[Upcoming Seminar] “City Cowherds”: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on China’s Peri-Urban Edge

Welcome to the new academic year! The Department of Anthropology has organized a new series of Friday Seminar for this semester. Come and join us!

“City Cowherds”: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on China’s Peri-Urban Edge 

Speaker: LING Minhua
(Assistant Professor, Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Time: 12:30 p.m., Friday, 13 September 2013
Venue: Room 401 Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK

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After three decades of massive internal migration, an increasing number of second-generation migrants come of age in their parents’ adopted cities and become a key source of urban China’s labor pool. However, they still face widespread discrimination and are denied proper residential status and public provisions in cities. This talk probes into their unique but understudied adolescent experiences and argues that migrant youth living on the urban fringe in Shanghai embody the emerging social space of in-betweenness that is neither fully rural nor urban during China’s rapid urbanization and social transformation. It demonstrates in ethnographic details how the enforced status of in-betweenness that results from rigid administrative categories and discursive binaries can be both alienating and empowering to migrant youth.

ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME
Feel free to bring your box lunch or sandwich to eat during the talk