International time: 17:00 Beijing, 11:00 Oslo, 05:00 (AM) Washington DC.
In Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generation are encouraged to develop themselves through international education, becoming independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other hand, strong neotraditionalist pressures from the state and from the family push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty.
Kailing Xie's book Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations: Perspectives from China's Privileged Young Women throws light on how gender affects the lives of well-educated urban Chinese women born in the 1980s. This book examines gendered attitudes in China to marriage, reproductive choices, career choices, and aspirations for a good life.
Fran Martin
Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Fran Martin has published widely on television, film, literature, Internet culture and other forms of cultural production in the contemporary transnational Chinese cultural sphere, with a specialisation in representations and cultures of gender and queer sexuality.
Kailing Xie
Lecturer in International Development at the University of Birmingham. Kailing Xie’s work investigates the underlying social, cultural and political tensions underpinning China's economic success through the lens of gender.
Mimi Lau
Journalist for the South China Morning Post. She spent seven years as the Post's Guangzhou correspondent before returning to Hong Kong in 2017. Today, she continues to pursue stories across the country, reporting on key political and civil issues. She will chair this seminar.
Heidi Østbø Haugen
The seminar series is hosted by Heidi Østbø Haugen, professor of China Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages. She heads the ERC-funded project Brokering China’s Extraversion: An Ethnographic Analysis of Transnational Arbitration (Brokex).
Other Events in the BROKEX Spring 2022 Seminar Series
China´s International Relations: South-South Perspectives
Date and time: 10 February 2022. 22:00 (Beijing), 15:00 (Oslo), 09:00 (EST). Sign-up.
Dawn Murphy: China's Rise in the Global South: The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing's Alternative World Order
Adam Grydehøj and Ping Su: China and the Pursuit of Harmony in World Politics: Understanding Chinese International Relations Theory
Discussant: Zeno Leoni
100 Years of Communism with Chinese Characteristics
Date and time: 3 March 2022. 23:00 (Beijing), 16:00 (Oslo), 10:00 (EST). Sign-up.
Tony Saich: From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
Bruce Dickson: The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century
Timothy Cheek: The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives
Discussant: Rebekka Åsnes Sagild
The Lives and Roles of Cadres in the Chinese Communist Party
Date and time: 4 May 2022. 21:00 (Beijing), 15:00 (Oslo), 09:00 (EST). Sign-up.
Julia Marinaccio: Linking Theory with Practice?: Cadre Training and Environmental Governance in China
Yunyun Zhou: Book project on communist women cadres' political encounters in China's local party-state
Discussant: Hedda Faltø
Organiser
The seminar is organised by Siv H. Oftedal and Kristian Sløgedal, as part of the project Brokering China’s Extraversion: An Ethnographic Analysis of Transnational Arbitration (Brokex). The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 802070) and the Research Council of Norway (project ID 275002).
