| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 傳播學院博士班 === 106 === As an intellectual group with high transnational mobility, nearly all nations compete for returnee scholars as they represent discursive, ideological, and economic forces. On the one hand, the state expects returnee scholars bring back advanced and needed techniques and knowledge to boost economic developments and enhance its legitimacy. On the other hand, their exposure to Western perspectives, radically different from Chinese ones, makes the state suspect that they are likely to deviate from official ideology and even a thorn in the side of China’s government. Therefore, why communication faculties in China, as a research field closely related with ideological issues, employ returnee scholars is of interest.
This study adopts Bourdieu’s field theory and employs in-depth interview and textual analysis to bring out motives and discourses of returne scholars recruitments. In addition , the author differentiates knowledge-production strategies of returnee scholars into six groups. Discourses of recruiting returnee scholars fall mainly on two expectations. Recruiting universities consider returnee scholars as intellectual resources for promoting for them a more prestigious position in competing for more so-called academic internationalization, and in the meantime the university normally puts faith in potentials of returnee scholars in exerting positive academic influences. Returnee scholars in turn will have to adopt different strategies to seek better political opportunities in the university system, these knowledge-production agents would wish to enrich and broaden their spaces for manoeuvre. Three broad facts may explain why different strategies of knowledge -production are employed: people committed to various values, the way they enter the field is different, and the generations they happened to start their academic career.
It is concluded that once people enters the field of communication academics, they are bound to be constrained or scrutinized in much a similar context, regardless whether they are returnee scholars or locally trained. Should build up and preserve or enrich academic autonomy a value cherished, the state needs to design accordingly a functional institution. For their part, intellectuals should try their best to produce knowledge that interacts critically with what the local needs, they can engage actively with colleagues, so that a future autonomous academic field may be nourished.
Keywords: Chinese Communication Academic Field, returnee-scholars, political opportunity structure, academic internationalization, ideology
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