International students’ family-mediated career futures

Building on the rising scholarly attention for relational understanding of family involvement in international student employment, this article explores the role of family in international student future-making through students’ narratives. Using narrative interviewing with Chinese international students at a United Kingdom university, this study examines students’ accounts of how family mediated their meaning-making about their possible career futures. The findings highlight that family impacts unfold through occupational memories, financial arrangements, expectations, conversations and intergenerational interpretations of what types of future are realistic, worthy of pursuing or postponing. By focusing on the period before and around anticipated return, this study captures how career possibilities were imagined, resisted, postponed, reconsidered, and revised through students’ interactions with family members and in response to changing policy and labour-market conditions. This study contributes to a temporal account of family mediation by showing how the meaning and force of family influence change as students encounter migration experiences, policy disruptions and uncertain labour markets.