Digital Dialogue #21

April 23, 2025, 12 PM

Transitioning Social Worlds between City and Countryside in China

China’s rapid socioeconomic development led to the emergence of huge groups that no longer fall into the neat dichotomy of “urban” versus “rural” but instead can be thought of as transitioning (or transitory?). This digital dialogue between two young scholars delves deeply into two of these groups, namely rural migrants and “landless peasants”. Both speakers recently completed their PhD theses on one of these topics and developed their own empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated understandings of these groups. In her work, Yueran Tian examines the lives of rural migrants working in an electronics factory as characterized by commuterization, hyper-flexibilization and financialization of social protection. Looking at “landless peasants” in the model town of Huaming, Tianjin, Isabel Heger-Laube analyses the processes of meaning-making regarding the urbanization process and the identities that these new urbanites develop. Both also deal with the role of the state in these processes. This digital dialogue will facilitate the comparison across these cases to foster a new and deeper understanding of transitioning social worlds between city and countryside in contemporary China.

Speakers:

Yueran (Lily) Tian holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Her research interests include care, labor mobility, moral personhood, welfare state and urban development in contemporary China. Her work has been published in Dialectical Anthropology and Global Political Economy, and she continues to engage in research on digital economy and the everyday life of Chinese urban residents from a comparative perspective.

Isabel Heger-Laube is a sinologist and social scientist with an interdisciplinary footing in social and cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology. She obtained her M.A. from the University of Vienna in 2013 and her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2024, where she worked as a research associate from 2014-2020. From 2021-2023, she co-led a research project on ageing without family caregivers at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. From October 2024 to March 2025, she was a research fellow in the project “Social worlds: China’s cities as spaces of worldmaking” in the Joint Center for Advanced Studies "Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China" at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Currently, she is in the process of publishing her dissertation as a monograph and doing an internship at the University Library Basel in the field of Open Science – Research Data Management.

April 23, 2025, 12 PM

Zoom Link:

https://uni-wuerzburg.zoom-x.de/j/63466152985?pwd=S3aZ3MFaunGrVa9QLDqgasTSZOQYPU.1

Please note that this event will be recorded.