A Discovery of Chinese Undergraduates’ Engagement on Campus

Lei, Yuhong and McArthur, Jan (2026) A Discovery of Chinese Undergraduates’ Engagement on Campus. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Student engagement is widely used in higher education policy and research, yet its meaning remains conceptually fragmented and research often privileges visible and measurable forms of participation. Empirically, existing studies tend to cluster around large-scale survey snapshots or tightly bounded analyses of engagement in particular tasks, classrooms, or platforms. Campus-wide accounts of how engagement unfolds in everyday university life remain limited. In China, student engagement has increasingly been adopted as a borrowed concept in policy and research, but its local interpretation, negotiation, and governance remain underexplored. This thesis addresses these gaps through a qualitative study of day-to-day undergraduate engagement at a Chinese public university. It asks: (1) in what ways do Chinese undergraduates describe their engagement, including whom they engage with, where engagement takes place, and what forms it takes; and (2) what enablers and barriers shape that engagement? Taking a non-normative stance, the study examines what undergraduates do rather than what they ought to do. It adopts a dual lens: a sociomaterial lens to trace everyday engagement practices, and a Foucauldian lens to analyse how governance, power, visibility, evaluation, and self-discipline shape those practices. The study draws on forty semi-structured interviews with undergraduates in Years 1–4, conducted in Chinese and analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. The findings show that engagement was selective, uneven, and object-related rather than a single stable condition. Participants engaged with a wide range of human and non-human actors, including teachers, peers, online materials, and Artificial Intelligence, across hybrid campus spaces. Conditions such as assessment demands, power relations, and surveillance did not operate as fixed enablers or barriers; their effects depended on how they were configured in particular situations. The thesis develops “made-in-China student engagement” as an analytic to capture a hybrid formation shaped by both international and local forces, and argues for understanding engagement as a lived practice organised through context, relations, and conditions.