ABSTRACT
How immigrants frame their futures through enacting differential aspirations is undertheorised in migration and diasporic studies. This ethnographic study presents three groups of Chinese immigrants in Luxembourg and their differential engagements with education as part of the aspirational project of future making: second-generation youth born into upper-middle-class professional families, second-generation youth with blue-collar restaurant parents, and 1.5-generation youth who arrived during childhood or adolescence. Building on Appadurai’s (2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso) notion of the ‘capacity to aspire’ and Bourdieu’s (1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) theorisation of capital and habitus, the paper examines the divergent ways immigrant youth and families negotiate an unequal terrain of educational possibilities and articulate future aspirations. While upper-middle-class professional families are compelled to pursue a future around individual distinction, those of working-class backgrounds engage in less risky credentialing strategies to secure social mobility. 1.5-generation youth and their families, on the other hand, exhibit immigrant pragmatism to obtain stable future livelihoods. Chinese immigrants’ divergent aspirations are intertwined with class, race, transnational connections and family strategies to shape the possibilities of future. The study contributes to the understanding of educational mobilities of Chinese immigrants, and illustrates the multiple aspirations, negotiations and educational futures within a rapidly stratifying Chinese diaspora.
