Abstract:

Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews with foreign scholars in China (hereafter ‘FSC’), this research investigates how various kinds of infrastructural interruptions affect transnational lives of mobile individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how their labour of maintenance and resourceful quick-fixes constitute infrastructuring strategies in times of isolation and uncertainty.

Specifically, the research first asks how certain COVID-19-led infrastructural barriers (e.g.,tightened visa policies, mandatory PCR testing for border crossing, suspended flights) intersect with the (im)mobility experiences and trajectories of FSC. Second, it explores whether and how these FSC manage to cope with infrastructural glitches by exercising a set of infrastructuring strategies to maintain transnational lives under the pandemic context. As such, this research develops a deeper understanding of not only the generative but also destructive capacities of infrastructural processes in terms of transforming migrant identities, aspirations and lived experiences, further revealing the situationality, incompleteness and fragility embedded in migration infrastructures. More critically, this study theorises how infrastructural interruptions also constitute the necessary social-temporal condition in which individual infrastructuring strategies emerge through works of waiting, adaptation and maintenance.