Navigating Fields of Inequality: A Bourdieusian and
Intersectional Analysis of Chinese Ethnic Minority Women’s
Post-Graduation Transitions

Abstract

This thesis explores how Chinese ethnic minority women navigate higher education institutions (HEIs) and transition into postgraduate education and the labour market, through the combined lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and intersectionality. Drawing on in-depth three rounds of interviews with fourteen ethnic minority women from diverse ethnicity, regional, and class backgrounds, this study interrogates how their trajectories are shaped by the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class within the stratified fields of Chinese higher education and graduate employment. A biographical narrative approach was employed to generate a longitudinal and contextualised understanding of how participants’ lived experiences were shaped by both structural constraints and individual agency, thereby capturing the dynamic interplay between personal biography and systemic inequality.
While admission to university is often framed as a pathway to upward mobility, this research reveals that access does not guarantee equal participation or success. Many participants experienced a deep sense of cultural displacement in HEIs, where dominant norms privileged Han, urban, and middle-class dispositions. Although preferential admission policies facilitated access, the absence of sustained institutional support after enrolment meant that their existing academic capital was often rendered insufficient within institutional environments that privileged unfamiliar linguistic, digital, and cultural forms of capital. This dynamic was further intensified by substantial regional inequalities in educational resources and provision. Many ethnic minority communities are geographically concentrated in economically less-developed regions, where access to high-quality basic education and preparatory resources has historically been more limited. As a result, students entered universities, especially elite ones in big cities, with uneven accumulation of the forms of capital most readily recognised and rewarded in these spaces. In the meantime, the process of adaptation, often marked by symbolic violence and identity negotiation, exposed the emotional and social costs of conforming to institutional expectations.
The thesis further examines participants’ strategic decisions to pursue postgraduate education through various routes, including internal recommendation systems, national entrance examinations, and international applications. These pathways were unequally accessible, reflecting the uneven distribution of capital and institutional support. In the labour market, participants confronted gendered expectations, ethnic discrimination, and class-based barriers, which shaped their position-taking between system-based (e.g., public sector) and market-based employment. For some, career choices were further constrained by familial obligations, cultural norms, and regional restrictions, revealing the ways in which intersectionality operates through both structural conditions and intimate social relations.
By situating participants’ narratives within the broader sociopolitical context of China’s expanding but stratified higher education system, this thesis contributes to the sociology of education and feminist scholarship on inequality. It demonstrates how intersecting forms of disadvantage shape not only educational outcomes but also students' aspirations, identities, and senses of belonging. In doing so, the study calls for a more nuanced understanding of meritocracy and mobility in contemporary China and the complex negotiations undertaken by those situated at the margins of power.