Rethinking International Internships: Affective Subjectivation and Normative Friction in the Chinese Context

This conceptual article reinterprets international internships not as neutral platforms for skill development, but as structured encounters with institutional normativity and affective dissonance.Focusing on the Chinese context -a high-power, collectivist regime shaped by hierarchical discipline and guanxi networks -the study theorizes internships as liminal spaces of ethical subjectivation and intercultural identity formation.Drawing on Foucault's disciplinary power, Bourdieu's concept of habitus, boundary-crossing theory, and affect theory, it develops a normative-affective framework to analyze how foreign interns navigate disorientation, emotional labor, and embodied negotiation.Emotions such as anxiety, shame, and ambivalence are theorized as epistemic affects -forms of situated knowledge that mediate encounters with unfamiliar regimes of value, recognition, and legitimacy.Internships are thus framed not as neutral educational tools but as affective pedagogies of the self, where identity is reconstituted through ongoing engagement with institutional power and normative pressure.This framework contributes to decolonial critiques of transnational education and challenges liberal models of intercultural competence by foregrounding the emotional labor required to remain intelligible within asymmetrical systems.The analysis invites new directions in understanding how global education produces, regulates, and contests subjectivity through emotionally charged institutional encounters.