Care and control: The built environment and emotional governance of left-behind children in a rural Chinese boarding school

Rural boarding schools have become central to China's efforts to educate and care for left-behind children, yet limited research has examined how their built environments shape everyday routines and emotional life. Drawing on eighteen months of sustained spatial ethnographic fieldwork at a recently redeveloped rural boarding school in central China, this study conceptualizes the campus as an emotional governance infrastructure through which architectural forms, institutional routines, and cultural practices jointly regulate behavior and produce affective atmospheres. Based on 120 student diaries, 43 interviews with teachers, administrators, and parents, eight sessions of participant observation, and visual methods, the analysis examines how gates, boundary walls, dormitories, classrooms, and green spaces function as technologies of care and control that choreograph movement, structure daily rhythms, and mediate feelings of safety, pressure, homesickness, and belonging. Organizational practices such as rituals, symbolic displays, and cultural activities further stabilize emotional climates by embedding moral expectations within material environments. The findings extend debates on disciplinary space, emotional geographies, and rural spatial justice by demonstrating that emotional well-being is produced through the interaction of spatial design, sensory experience, and institutional order. The study highlights implications for more child-centered and emotionally responsive school design and governance.