Living the policy: negotiating difference in a multiethnic high school in Southwest China

Abstract

This thesis explores the construction, interpretation, and negotiation of linguistic and ethnic “difference” within a multiethnic high school in Yunnan Province, Southwest China, one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse regions in the country. Grounded in the ideological framework of “the Pattern of Diversity within Unity for the Chinese Nation” (中华民族多元一体格局), as shaped by Chinese sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910–2005), the study examines how students, teachers, and the researcher navigate linguistic and ethnic “differences” as lived experiences within this policy context.

Adopting a linguistic ethnographic approach, the study draws on a rich dataset, namely, semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, students’ diary entries, and the researcher’s reflexive memos. Notably, the diary entries provided access to affective and sensory accounts of lived experiences that extended beyond what could be captured through direct observation or interviews. The analysis is theoretically grounded in sociolinguistic understandings of translanguaging as an ideological and performative stance toward the fluidity of meaning-making and identity negotiation (Zhu & Li, 2020, 2022; Creese & Blackledge, 2015; Li, 2018). It also draws on critical perspectives on language and nationalism (Anderson, 2016a; Fishman, 1972), and Fei Xiaotong’s (1994) concept of reflexive positionality, enabling an account of the multiple voices of students, teachers, and the researcher.

The findings reveal that “difference” is not inherently fixed, but emerges as a dynamic and interactionally constructed phenomenon, shaped by institutional categories, mobility trajectories, linguistic repertoires, and underlying language ideologies. They further reveal the flexible nature of identity work as performed by students, who draw on their communicative repertoires to actively reposition themselves within institutional frames. By closely examining the multiple layers of translanguaging in students’ linguistic practices, I show that translanguaging is not merely the mixing of named languages, but a semiotic resource through which students make sense of their lived experiences. I argue that translanguaging here functions as an interpretive practice where affective, contextual, and ideological meanings are constructed and reshaped across temporal and spatial spaces. Importantly, the researcher’s own subjectivity, as a Han-identifying academic trained in the UK, becomes an integral part of the meaning-making process. Reflexive engagement highlights how difference is co-constructed through the relational dynamics between participants and researcher.

This thesis contributes to sociolinguistic understandings of what and how young people deploy their linguistic repertoires in China today. It offers fresh insight into how multilingual youth navigate layered constructions of ethnicity and language within the policy context, and into the negotiated nature of “difference” within social categories. While grounded in the specific context of Southwest China, this study offers a reflexive lens that may inform understandings of the individual-society relationship in multiethnic and multilingual settings.