Everyday geopolitical governance: perspectives of faculty and chinese doctoral students in U.S. higher education

Universities increasingly operate in a geopolitical environment in which international collaboration, research security, academic mobility, and technological competition are closely intertwined. Yet less is known about how geopolitical change is translated into routine academic practice. This article introduces Everyday Geopolitical Governance as a framework for examining that translation. The concept is newly developed in this study but draws on critical and feminist work on everyday geopolitics, organizational approaches to university governance, and scholarship on anticipatory action under uncertainty. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with 19 participants affiliated with U.S. higher education institutions: 14 faculty members (four U.S.-born and ten China-origin scholars) and five Chinese doctoral students. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the study examines how participants described changes in collaboration, research administration, mobility, and career planning. The analysis is interpretive and does not seek statistical comparison across participant sub-groups. Three interrelated mechanisms emerged from the analysis. Organizational mediation captures how universities translate geopolitical priorities into procedures and routines; differentiated vulnerability describes how exposure to uncertainty varies with disciplinary, career-stage, institutional, and national positioning; and anticipatory adaptation explains how academics adjust present decisions in light of possible future policy or political change. Within this sample, geopolitical governance was experienced less as direct state intervention than as a combination of institutional mediation and anticipatory professional judgement. The framework connects geopolitical transformation, university governance, and academic agency while remaining attentive to the bounded perspectives represented in the study.