Somatic recalibration and embodied capital conversion: a collective case study of international sport students’ corporeal adaptation in Chinese universities

This collective instrumental case study investigates how international students in sport-related disciplines at Chinese universities undergo what I term somatic recalibration—a slow, pre-reflective restructuring of bodily dispositions when habitus encounters an unfamiliar educational field. Drawing on Bourdieu’s embodied cultural capital, Csordas’s somatic modes of attention, Mauss’s body techniques, and Wacquant’s carnal sociology, I analyse the corporeal dimensions of cross-cultural adaptation among five international students from diverse backgrounds studying at three Chinese universities. Data from semi-structured interviews, learning journals, and English-language social media posts were analysed through theoretically informed reflexive thematic analysis (Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2019). Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 11(4), 589–597) and treated as a crystallisation (Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research. SAGE) of distinct embodied performances: the narrated body, the reflected-on body, and the curated body. Three interpretive themes were generated: (1) the disciplined body encounters the unfamiliar field, capturing how participants decoded somatic pedagogies, inverted theory – practice hierarchies, and navigated doxic rupture; (2) corporeal belonging and the reconfigured self, revealing that physical capital functioned as a more effective medium of social integration than linguistic competence; and (3) capital conversion at the somatic frontier, documenting participants’ creative reconstruction of embodied capital across cultural systems. The concept of somatic recalibration extends adaptation theory by identifying a mechanism that operates below the threshold of conscious deliberation, and the notion of transcultural embodied capital complicates Bourdieu’s assumption that capital depreciates when transferred across fields. The study demonstrates that in body-intensive professional disciplines, the body constitutes not a peripheral dimension of cross-cultural adaptation but its primary arena.