Shi, Yu (Aimee); (2024) Becoming happy: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of a transnational Chinese cultural academy in the UK. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis presents a critical sociolinguistic ethnography of a transnational spiritual-cultural NGO named Mindfulness Culture Academy in the UK that involves a group of Chinese international students, young professionals, and migrants. By examining MCA’s attempts to re-articulate moral principles and social relations based on mutual care, the thesis analyses the daily making of this transnational community and the consequences for the social actors involved as they affectively orient themselves towards happiness in reaction to the neoliberal emphasis on profit-making and competition. These ideas, knowledge, and values created and negotiated within MCA are believed to enact the living of a more fulfilling life as manifested in communicatively mediated self-transformations of participants. Various types of data were generated between 2019 and 2023, including observations of weekly group sharing sessions, relevant caring and volunteering activities, social gatherings and site visits in London and China, interviews and informal interactions with participants and volunteers, in addition to virtual and physical materials produced by MCA and the participants. Through the lens of stance-taking, discourse registers and trajectories of identification, data analysis suggests that communicative practices at MCA perform the spiritual cultivation of a positive mentality considered vital to living a happier and more meaningful life, in contrast to societal normative expectations for individuals to chase after material-based external pleasures. The thesis argues that the communicative doing of spirituality within MCA enables the formation of imaginings alternative to neoliberal forms of market rationality while, at the same time, leaving the material structure of neoliberalism somewhat intact. The emphasis on introspection, self-reform and the capacity to adapt to certain conditions may inadvertently obscure the larger structural forces that constrain their mobility. The thesis also reveals how practices and processes of becoming happier are entangled with multi-layered normative orders as the participants move between China and the UK.

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