Date : 2024-09-10

Venue : Chen Kou Bun Building 109 (CKB 109), CUHK

Wednesday Gender Seminar

Gendering Grassrootscapes: Destitute and Disadvantaged Women in the Socialist Workers’ New Villages in Contemporary Shanghai

Date and Time: 9 Oct (Wed) 12:30–2:00pm, HK Time

Venue: Chen Kou Bun Building 109 (CKB 109), CUHK

Speaker: Prof. Penn Tsz Ting IP (Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University)

Moderator: Prof. Ling HAN (Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Abstract

Women of the lower working-class in Shanghai are seemingly invisible in Chinese urban scholarship. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021 in Shanghai, this paper sheds light on the social lives of lower working-class women dwelling in the Workers’ New Villages in the wake of rapid urbanization. Mounting a threefold conceptual exploration of grassroots urbanism, genderscapes, and guanxi (social connectivity), the paper develops and coins the term “grassrootscapes” to explicate grassroots women’s sociospatial relations with housing units, the community, and the city. Probing these multi-layered horizons to trace women’s life trajectories and gendered experiences, the paper discerns the ways in which sociospatial dynamics of grassrootscapes are produced under a socialist system, in which women’s day-to-day suffering is a by-product of market reforms. Socialist workers’ housing is employed as a case study to show how the conceptualization of grassrootscapes can be a useful tool to examine the social transformation brought about by the drastic changes in urban policies in globalizing cities.

Speaker’s Biography

Penn Tsz Ting IP is Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, and a core member of the SSHRC-funded partnership project “Urbanization, Gender and the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb). Her research interests include gender and women’s studies, youth culture, urban studies, migration studies, and affect theory. Her research has been published in Emerging Media, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the Journal of Gender Studies, and Urban Affairs. Ip is the first author of The Ordinary Women: Qualitative Research on Workers’ New Villages in Shanghai (2021). Collaborated with professors and students at Hong Kong Metropolitan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ip is the director of the feminist research platform “HEResearch: Global Distinguished Scholar Lecture Series.”

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13694426