The article entitled “Desirability, technical skills, and misrecognition: Cultural capital and rural students’ social integration in elite Chinese universities” written by Associate Professor Xie Ailei from the School of Education of Guangzhou University(GZHU) was published on Poetics. Using data on a group of rural students at four elite universities in China, the article shows how they exclude themselves from participating in student bodies, which is crucial for the accumulation of social and cultural capital, by misrecognizing their urban peers as more competent because of the knowledge and skills they acquired outside of school before entering university. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting that social disadvantage can also arise when underprivileged groups misrecognize the knowledge and skills possessed by the privileged as symbols of ability, even if such knowledge and skills are not necessarily recognized by any institutional criterion.
Associate Professor Xie Ailei is the only author.
Chinese