Roommate relationships in Chinese university dormitories: students' life experience and perception

The residential arrangement in which 4 to 6 students share one room during each year of their undergraduate studies presents a particular context in Chinese universities. How students manage these spaces and their relationships with each other are important to these young people’s everyday lives, their friendships and tensions in higher education. However, this is not widely researched in higher education studies. The few existing Chinese studies on this type of relationship tend to focus on dorm conflicts, attributing these to students’ lack of collectivistic and harmonious oriented awareness and social abilities. However, students’ everyday interactions and relationship negotiations and their associations with the materialities of dorms and wider institutional and sociocultural contexts are often overlooked. Thus, I conducted a qualitative study to explore these questions, bringing together literature drawing on the debates of student’s social relationships in higher education, relationality in personal life and materiality in domestic settings (particularly shared living) to examine the lived experiences of students living in Chinese dormitories. Alongside analysing 10 Chinese universities’ digital platforms about their policies of student dormitories and roommates, I also interviewed 30 undergraduate and postgraduate Chinese university students, who also produced their dorm photographs of their dorms and emotion maps, depicting their living experiences in the shared dormitories. As revealed by the data, student dormitories are conceived and presented as rule-bound training sites for being ‘good’ citizens, students are expected to acquire competences like ‘collective spirit’ and a sense of group responsibility. Nevertheless, the thesis demonstrates that students’ acquisition and practices of these competencies and their micro intimacies and conflicts in shared dorm living are more complex, multifaceted and unpredictable than assumed in existing literatures and, the ways they are shaped by universities’ institutional environments as well as, the design and materials of the shared residential spaces are also multifaceted and unpredictable. The project thus broadens understanding of university roommate relationships in Chinese studies. It also builds dialogues among the sociological debates about higher education, relationality and materiality, extending these literatures by bringing them to bear on new global contexts.