Jun Chu
“Urban citizenship, mobility and border regime. Contested social spaces of migrant workers in Shanghai.”
Date: July 15, 2014, 6.15pm-7.30pm
Place: CeMEAS-Meeting Room, KWZ-Building, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14
Abstract:
The growing mass protests and movements of migrant workers in China have become a highly focused issue for years. They are described either as “contesting citizenship in urban china” (Solinger 1999) or as “the making of a new working class” (Chan and Pun 2009). In my dissertation, these phenomena will be understood in connection with citizenship, mobility regime and the production of social spaces from a critical perspective. In reference to the concepts of “act of citizenship/doing citizenship”, “differential inclusion” and “ethnographical border regime analysis” from critical migration and citizenship studies, this work will focus on the social processes, how urban citizenship in Shanghai is emerging in contestation and conflicts. In what way do the local governments make policy and use strategies to include migrant workers with gradated status of “urban citizen”? How do the migrant workers in Shanghai practice urban citizenship and claim their rights in daily life and workplace? Furthermore, how are urban spaces produced and negotiated through the assemblage of these multi-scale practices? The research is based on empirical fieldwork in Shanghai with mixed qualitative methods incl. narrative interviews, participated observation and discourse analysis etc. The next fieldwork is planned for the upcoming autumn.
Jun Chu
Since 10/2013 PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology, University of Göttingen, Germany
Title of Dissertation: Urban citizenship, mobility and border regime. Contested social spaces of migrant workers in Shanghai.
10/2009 – 05/2013 University of Göttingen, Germany, Sociology and Cultural Anthropology(M.A.)
Title of Master Thesis: The constitution of relational social spaces in a new tenement district. A case study about Zietenterrassen in Göttingen. – Awarded “with distinction”
08/2005 – 07/2009 Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Sociology (B.A.) -Title of Bachelor Thesis: “Hygiene” in the rural everyday life. A case study on social changes in terms of practices, perceptions and interpretations.