Author: chineseedmobilities

程猛博士，北京师范大学，中国

English Version

主要作品

1.程猛. 读书的料及其文化生产——当代农家子弟成长叙事研究. 中国社会科学出版社，2018。

2.程猛、康永久. 从农家走进精英大学的年轻人：“懂事”及其命运. 中国青年研究，2018（5）。

3.程猛、陈娴. “读书的料”及其文化意蕴.基础教育,2018（5）。

4.程猛. 农村出身：一种复杂的情感结构. 青年研究，2018（6）。

5.程猛、康永久.“物或损之而益”:关于底层文化资本的另一种言说.清华大学教育研究，2016（4）。

6.程猛、陈娴. “循规者”的文化生产. 青年研究，2016（2）。

作品简介

近四年来，我的研究聚焦于当代中国一群特别的农家子弟。他们在改革开放之后出生，历经种种风险和不确定性，最终进入了精英大学。这群农家子弟的特别之处，主要体现在以下三点。首先，作为建国以来第一代在市场经济大潮下成长的农家子弟，其成长经历伴随着中国社会几千年从农业社会步入商业社会的大变局。在这一过程中，原先的政治分层逐渐被经济分层所替代，城乡经济发展的差异更加显著，地域之差演变为经济社会发展的巨大差异。其次，他们有着共通的跨越城乡边界的求学和生命历程，城乡二元结构深刻嵌入其生命历程当中。城乡经济发展的不平衡致使教育资源的不平衡愈演愈烈，他们中的许多人在生命早期进入城市求学，深刻体验着城乡不平等。再次，在中国特殊的城乡二元社会结构影响下，这些农家子弟不仅在经济地位上处于社会底层，在政治身份上也处于底端。相比于城市社会底层子弟，农家子弟身上交汇着地域、身份和阶层三种结构性力量。

从空间上看，这群农家子弟的求学历程是以家庭为中心，从农村、县城、小城市到大城市一圈圈向外扩展的波纹型变动。从时间上看，他们的求学历程也是一次次从家返校，从校返家的候鸟式流动。与父辈不同，这个群体中的大多数人只是农村生活的过客，他们最终会在城市从事中产阶层式的工作，成为“走出农村、改变命运”的美谈。人们大多注意到了他们外在的学业成功，却不清楚这样一场漫长的“子不承父业”的阶层跨越之旅中特殊的内心体验与社会行动。某种意义上，他们就是特朗德曼（Mats Trondman）所言的当代中国的阶层旅行者（class travellers）（Trondman，2006；2018）。他们历经寒窗进入精英大学，最终是为了实现阶层突破，而这也同时意味着他们的大学生活最终会“不成为他们的母亲，他们的姑妈，他们的父亲。”（Hurst，2012）

我更愿意用一个中国本土的隐喻来指代这样一群农家子弟：“读书的料”（college material）。这项有关“读书的料”的研究的灵感来自于与保罗•威利斯(Paul Willis)的文化生产理论以及皮埃尔•布迪厄(Pierre Bourdieu)文化资本理论(Bourdieu 1986, 1990)的对话，但最终这里所呈现的研究结论又与这些理论非常不同。下面的文字是我最近出版的著作《“读书的料”及其文化生产——当代农家子弟成长叙事研究》的摘要：

在保罗•威利斯的经典著作《学做工：工人阶级子弟为何继承父业》中，“循规者”是创造“反学校文化”的“家伙们”的陪衬(Willis 1981a, 1981b)。国内研究者也大多沿袭这一范式，聚焦底层违规生的文化生产(熊易寒，2010；周潇，2011; 熊春文等，2013; 李涛，2014)。这种文化生产的逻辑是：底层子弟通过生产群体亚文化，主动放弃通过教育向上流动的可能性，最终陷入阶层复制的自我诅咒。在这类研究里，取得高学业成就、最终可能实现阶层突破的底层子弟被选择性遗忘了。这类底层子弟真的是《学做工》所刻画的“书呆子”吗？“循规”背后究竟有怎样的文化生产？他们的主动性和创造性绽放于何处？

基于以上疑问，本研究反其道而行之，将注意力转向底层子弟在取得高学业成就、实现阶层突破进程中的文化生产。在改革开放之后出生、最终进入精英大学的农家子弟，为我们在中国情境下探索“阶层突破中的文化生产问题”提供了理想的样本。本书将这样一群农家子弟称为“读书的料”。借助自传社会学和深度访谈的方法，本研究试图解释性地理解高学业成就的农家子弟在通过教育向上流动过程中的文化生产及其非预期后果。为此，论文拓展了文化生产理论的适用群体和时空范围，围绕“读书的料”的成长叙事，探寻他们的意义世界。

研究发现：（1）存在一种遵循“物或损之而益”逻辑并最终通往高学业成就的文化生产。“读书的料”创生出先赋性动力、道德化思维以及学校化的心性品质，所有这些有力地支撑着他们的学校生活。（2）“读书的料”的文化生产突显出中国底层特有的文化资本。据此可以认为，农家子弟取得高学业成就的关键不在于其弥补了自身文化资本的缺陷，而是充分利用底层特有文化资本的结果。（3）底层文化资本是一柄双刃剑，其局限性一直存在并在进入大学之门后愈发凸显。先赋性动力经常伴随着极大的后坐力，道德化思维潜伏着巨大的心理压力，学校化的心性品质则高度依赖及时激励的制度情境和强有力的公共教育体系；（4）底层子弟的文化生产具有复杂性，伴随高学业成就而生的是一个隐匿的暗面。在逐级跨越学业阶梯的过程中，他们生发出了一个复杂的、以农村出身为中心的情感结构，身心难得自如。“懂事”虽然让他们融入了家庭共同体，但也同时框定了他们的家庭角色，限制了他们的情感表达，衍生出与家人爱怨交织的关系结构。此外，他们还在阶层和文化穿梭的过程中成了村庄的边缘人，面临人际交往的双重高墙，缺乏文化归属感。（5）“读书的料”取得高学业成就的另一代价是基于个人苦修之上的片面发展，引发严重的成功焦虑，承受贤能主义的竞争风险，陷入异化与自我疏离的困扰，甚至走向成功与幸福相对立的道路。

由此可以进一步确认：第一，在反学校文化之外，创造性还有另外一种可能，即通过某种意义上的“循规”，进行主动的文化生产，最终走向生活重建和阶层突破。“读书的料”并非完全基于天生丽质，其背后有一个基于中国的文化传统、家庭和学校生活实践的道德世界，这样一个世界极大地激发了他们自身的能动性。由此可见，“循规”也是一个文化生产过程，家人关系则是探索高学业成就的底层子弟文化生产的重要面向。第二，文化资本不是均质化的存在，社会底层也有其独特的文化资本。底层文化资本即先赋性动力、道德化思维以及学校化的心性品质。这种文化资本不是自然之物，只有在文化生产中才能呈现自身。底层文化资本理论以其特有的方式将文化生产与文化再生产理论相连，沿着布迪厄与威利斯未曾料想到的方向发展了他们的思想，一定程度上也颠覆了“底层缺乏文化资本”这一为学界默认的观念。第三，对底层子弟而言，要么因抵制而被淘汰、要么被中上阶层文化同化和笼络而背叛原生家庭的二律背反并非铁律。阶层和文化穿梭促成情感定向的重叠交织。高学业成就的农家子弟并没有完全割舍与原生家庭的文化连接，而是情感上与家人爱怨交织，在行动中创造性地重建着家人关系。

“读书的料”的高学业成就既受制于底层的客观经济条件，又同时受益于其主观意向状态的创造性力量。威利斯忽略了高学业成就的底层子弟可能具有的文化生产能量，布迪厄则忽略了行动者的个人意志与社会结构之间的复杂关系，“物或损之而益”的思想路径在他们的理论设想里没有丝毫的生存空间。“读书的料”的人生是披荆斩棘的旅程。对他们而言，客观的家庭经济条件不是宿命，底层文化资本不是永恒的达摩克利斯之剑，心理和情感结构的藩篱也并非不可逾越。在一个更加健全、公正、多元和开放的社会中，“读书的料”作为一个地位群体所体尝的痛苦将会得到减缓，其文化世界面临的风险也一定程度上可以化解。

部分参考文献

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986.The Forms of Capital In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, J. E. Richardson (ed), New York: Greenword.

Bourdieu, Pierre &Jean-Claude Passeron, 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: SAGE Publications.

Hurst, Allison .2012. College and the working class：What it takes to make it，Sense publishers.

李涛. 2014. 底层社会与教育——一个中国西部农业县的底层教育真相[D]. 东北师范大学博士学位论文.

Trondman, Mats. 2006. “Disowning knowledge: To be or not to be ‘the immigrant’ in Sweden”, Ethnic and Racial Studies，vol.29(3).

Trondman, Mats. 2018. Educating Mats: Encountering Finnish ‘lads’ and Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour in Sweden, Ethnography, vol.19(4).

Willis, Paul. 1981a. Learning to Labor：How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Columbia University Press.

——1981b “Cultural production is different from cultural reproduction is different from social reproduction is different from reproduction”, Interchange, Vol.12.

熊易寒. 2010. 底层、学校与阶级再生产[J]. 开放时代（1）.

熊春文. 2013.义的双重体验——农民工子弟的群体文化及其社会意义[J]. 北京大学教育评论.（1）.

周潇. 2011.反学校文化与阶级再生产：“小子”与“子弟”之比较[J]. 社会.（5）.

作者简介

程猛博士目前是北京师范大学讲师，教育社会学、教育人类学、教育管理与教育政策是他的主要研究领域。2017年，程猛博士在北京师范大学取得教育学博士学位。2017年至2019年，他在清华大学公共管理学院做博士后研究。2015至2016年，他还被选派至威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校进行访学。他的研究成果主要集中在以下三个方面：1.试图解释为什么来自社会底层的农家子弟依然能够取得高学业成就。基于对大学生教育自传的分析，他提出了“底层文化资本理论”，认为这群农家子弟生产了一种特殊类型的文化资本——底层文化资本（清华大学教育研究，2016）；2. 取得高学业成就、实现阶层突破的非预期后果（中国青年研究，2018；青年研究，2018；基础教育，2018）；3. 进入精英大学的农家子弟在攀爬教育阶梯过程中的文化生产（青年研究，2016；中国社会科学出版社，2018）。他目前在进行的研究项目之一是“当代中国农家子弟的阶层旅行与文化生产”。此外，他还在结合医学人类学的研究范式，进行大学生心理和精神健康相关的研究。他的邮箱是chengmengbnu@126.com，欢迎来信！

Cheng, YE and Jacobs, JM (2019) Urban custodians and hospitable citizens: Citizenship and social actions of students at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Space and Polity. DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2019.1670053.

 The article is published as part of a Special Issue on Youth Politics in Urban Asia co-edited by Yi’En Cheng and Sonia-Lam Knott, which will appear in print April 2020. 

Dr Yi’En Cheng, National University of Singapore

Article Summary

Drawing upon the cases of two liberal arts universities in East Asian cities, this article trains the analytic lens on higher education practices and cultural arrangements that give meanings to politics and the political, and in turn addresses two interrelated questions: Where is urban politics located as it relates to the everyday work that students do to manage and create change? What constitutes youth politics in the city? The research that informs this article is a study on the travel of American-style liberal arts education into East Asia resulting in both curricular reforms as well as brand new campuses being built. It investigates particularly into the citizenship projects that underpin these initiatives. Fieldwork involving interviews and ethnographic observations was carried out in 2018 at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and NYU-Shanghai in China.

By focusing on the two groups of Hong Konger and mainland Chinese domestic students at Lingnan and NYU-Shanghai, this article offers an account of how young people’s citizenship and social actions are produced across spaces of the university and the city. It demonstrates that young students’ civic and political subjectivities are being shaped by and informing their social actions, and in the process reveal the ways in which higher education spaces condition and mediate youthful urban politics.

Both Lingnan University and NYU-Shanghai identify themselves explicitly as liberal arts educational institutions with a core vision of promoting a well-rounded learning experience that would cultivate students into cosmopolitan and moral citizens. An important element of this vision is for the universities to encourage community engagement among students, through designing a range of curricular, extra-curricular, and pedagogical programmes as well as supporting student-led initiatives tied to civic interests. This desire to instill a social purpose and to bridge the university with the communities that it serves has meant that the city – and its districts as well as neighbourhoods – is key to how both liberal arts universities view their role as urban educational and cultural institutions.

Hong Konger students at Lingnan University craft a narrative of liberal learning as a journey for young people to find ways to contribute towards society and to serve the communities that they inhabit, reflecting the university’s strategic blending of Service-Learning into its approach towards liberal arts education. They see themselves as urban repairers and innovators who aspire to take custodianship of a city that is perceived to be decaying under the weight of an inept government. There is a strong desire among these young people to safeguard a series of post-materialistic values that underpin their idea of the ‘good city’. Students seek to innovate projects such as those aimed at protecting local arts and culture (example of Cantonese as a linguistic resource) through which the ‘Hong Kong’ identity is define, and the protection of vulnerable urban communities in the city such as that of the elderly. This brand of urban custodial civic politics does not challenge political authorities head-on but seek to make right the urban conditions in which they envision themselves having to navigate and to grow up in. In a way, this is a politics not of overt contestation and conflict but of redress through direct action.

Mainland Chinese students at NYU-Shanghai define liberal arts learning as a process leading to individual expansion of worldviews enabling them to question their own political and moral orientations, particularly those that lie beyond China and what is being endorsed by the state. Through both earlier national education and present liberal arts curriculum, students develop a certain brand of urban ethic emphasizing the values of diversity and cosmopolitanism as well as a habit of solidarity and conviviality. By framing their aspirations and social actions as urban ethic, Chinese students can bypass an explicit identification with anti-government politics and political activism that is largely an out-of-bound topic within the national context. They mobilize through social media platforms, university clubs and societies, and hall committee to design a range of small-scale projects that reflect their civic aspirations and proclivities. Through these engagements, students rehearse their role as hospitable citizens of the city and the country by imagining themselves becoming cultural mediators of difference. This style of urban ethic constitutes a form of civic politics in that it addresses the possibility of collective culture, of respect, and of civility, and more importantly serves as a form of viable political expression for these young people.

Key contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it demonstrates empirically how higher educational institutions are informing and conditioning young people’s understandings of civic and political citizenship in relationship with the urban and national contexts. Urban politics as it relates to higher education therefore can be conceptualized as unfolding in and through the multi-scalar relationships formed across the cities, the universities, and the students, and the circulation of power across these sites in the forms of discourses and resources. Second, social actions of these liberal arts educated students point the importance of recognizing youth politics beyond galvanized antagonistic and activist movements. Furthermore, students practise a kind of generative politics concerned chiefly with protecting and making resources they imagine as vital to the city, as well as with cultivating urban sensibilities and relationships that help navigate consensus and conflict.

Lastly, custodial and hospitable styles of politics are by no means the only political genre undertaken by students at the two universities or young people more broadly at the two cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai. The ongoing political situation in Hong Kong is a reminder of how mass demonstration and antagonism are still an integral component of young people’s political repertoire. As such, urban youth politics expressed in the forms of civic/non-contentious actions or insurgent/antagonistic actions are not binary opposition; instead both forms serve to invigorate young people’s realm of political action. It is vital to maintain such a supple and less circumscribed view in order to more fully understand the relationship between cities and youth politics.

Relevant article

Cheng, Y.E. (2018) Liberal arts educated citizen: Experimentation, subjectification, and ambiguous contours of youth citizenship, Area. DOI: 10.1111/area.12440

 Corresponding Author Biography

Yi’En Cheng is Research Fellow in the Asian Migration cluster at Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection across education, youth, and mobilities in Asian cities. He is guest editor of Special Issues ‘Geographies of Citizenship in Higher Education’ in Area (with Mark Holton) and ‘Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies (with Shanthi Robertson and Brenda Yeoh). Prior to joining ARI, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale-NUS College and Clarendon Scholar at University of Oxford where he completed a DPhil in Human Geography.

Wang, Bingyu. (2019). Time in migration: temporariness, precarity and temporal labour amongst Chinese scholars returning from the Global North to South. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1642741

Related article: Wang, Bingyu. (2019). A Temporal Gaze Towards Academic Migration: Everyday Times, Lifetimes and Temporal Strategies amongst Early Career Chinese Academic Returnees. Time and Society. DOI: 10.1177/0961463X19873806

Bingyu Wang, School of Sociology and Anthropology, Sun Yat-sen University

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARTICLE

While facing labour precarity of the increasingly competitive academia-industry, mobile academics encounter another set of challenges brought by the global shift away from permanent migration towards more temporary forms of migration since the 2000s. Yet, the occurrence and impact of ‘temporariness’ in academic migration, especially at the personal and individual level, are not well understood. Drawing on qualitative research with 40 early career Chinese academic returnees, this paper focuses on the state of ‘being temporary’ Chinese academic returnees experience both before and after their return. Their temporary status in host countries undermines their labour market performance and thus cause job insecurities and fragmented career paths, which instils a sense of precariousness and powerlessness into their daily lives. As a result, many of them decided to return, but only to find that they are thrown into another state of temporariness – they end up inhabiting fragile institutional positions or have their lifetime progressions interrupted and suspended while aspiring to establish themselves in academia. Their temporary contracts and/or compulsory return impose a set of emotional burdens on them and thus reshape their subjectivities, causing anxiety, distress and all sorts of temporal precarities.

Despite the state of ‘being temporary’ and related many temporal impediments faced by these academic returnees both before and after the return, exercising individual agency and developing temporal strategies was a clear theme that emerged from their narratives. First, some of them immerse themselves into a positive waiting period and perceives their temporary jobs as a preparation stage for longer-term employment opportunities. Second, in order to mitigate the negative effects caused by their physical departure from the western academic community, some interviewees practise temporary academic mobilities both on a national and an international level. That way, they can avoid academic immobilities and the dangers of being stuck with ‘double absence’. In addition, some returnees absorb hopes and motivations through nurturing alternative career pathways and imagining multiple futures.

In this regard, this article makes the following contributions. First, theoretically, it has contributed to addressing the intensifying spatial emphasis of migration studies whereby the temporal dimensions have been neglected either as an independent research approach or subject of debate. Moreover, it has further demonstrated how macro-level or institutional temporal discourses (e.g. migration policy, visa status, work contract length) can intimately affect the micro-politics of migrant lives and subjectivities, including their individual lifetime progressions, labour market performances and everyday forms of social belonging. In this respect, this article has delved into the question of how the constructions of time articulate with migration temporalities, and thus brought the temporal and emotional dimension of migration to the fore and unpacked how they intersect with each other in shaping migrant lives.

Second, empirically, this article has not only looked at the conventional academic migration pattern moving from the Global South to the Global North but also focused on the return. Meanwhile, the majority of existing literature on ‘time and academia’ has mainly focused on scholars in the West and rather fewer attempts have been made at a cross-country level. Furthermore, by examining the temporal precarity embedded in the lives of academic migrants, this article challenges some of the standard claims around highly skilled mobility as relatively ‘seamless’ or ‘smooth’ and thus contributes to a more comprehensive understanding towards high-status migration.

Third, this article has drawn attention to the growing trend of temporariness and pre- cariousness involved in modern academia, especially in the context of migration. Those mobile scholars under temporary contracts have to familiarise themselves with a life of unstable labour and unpredictable career futures. Critically, the article has not only focused on the temporal precarity academic migrants encounter but also investigated the way they exercise their agentive will. In doing so, the paper shows that, despite positions of vulnerability, mobile academics are not merely victims of their temporal predicament, but rather, find ways to engage in temporal labour, navigating through the uneven temporal terrains they inhabit. Their experiences of both precarity and agency relating to the current academic migration offer insights into understanding how other new forms of temporary migration regimes trans- form mobile individuals’ subjectivities and living realities, and in turn, whether and how some of those ‘precariats’ manage to obtain a greater sense of control of their ‘time’, to pursue positive migration and life outcomes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Bingyu Wang is an Associate Professor at the School of Sociology and Anthropology of Sun Yat-sen University, where she was recruited as a member of the ‘100 Top Talents Program’. Her research areas include migration and mobilities, intercultural encounters, and cosmopolitanism, with an empirical focus on highly-skilled migrants and temporary migrants, and a theoretical focus on emotions, time and the everyday. She has published widely in high-ranked international journals and is the author of New Chinese Migrants in New Zealand: Becoming Cosmopolitan? Roots, Emotions and Everyday Diversity (Routledge, 2019). Currently she is conducting a project on academic mobilities in and out of China supported by ‘National Social Science Fund of China’.  Bingyu is on the editorial board of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.  She can be reached at wangby29@mail.sysu.edu.cn or via her profile page at Research Gate.

Ma, J., & Montgomery, C. (2019). Constructing Sustainable International Partnerships in Higher Education: Linking the Strategic and Contingent Through Interpersonal Relationships in the United Kingdom and China. Journal of Studies in International Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315319865784

Dr Jie Ma, Xiamen University, China

This paper attempts to highlight interpersonal relationships as the missing link in constituting sustainable international partnerships amid an increasingly strategic landscape of higher education internationalization. Drawing upon 31 semi-structured interviews with different administrative and disciplinary staff in two universities in the UK and China, the paper presents a shared construction of sustainable international partnerships in higher education across both contexts that it is those inter-personal human relationships built upon shared interests and ethical qualities that make partnerships sustainable. The reason that interpersonal relationships are perceived to be a strong basis for interweaving sustainable partnerships is because there is an inherent research interest for individual academics to engage in their disciplinary networks and a built-in mutual understanding, respect and trust within those human relationships. Instead of strategic planning, those human relationships, usually developed after a chance encounter, through contingent activities, such as attending conferences, studying or visiting abroad, are based on shared interests (especially shared research interests) between individual academics. However, because people together with their interpersonal relationships might leave the institution and if that person is the only nexus of the partnership between the universities, then partnerships tend to unravel. In this regard, partnerships built upon interpersonal relationships are embedded enough in the network of individuals but not enough in the institutions. In this sense, instead of individuality, sustainable partnership building is about team playing, which suggests the significance of multiple engagement in the established interpersonal relationships. To make such team playing or multiple engagement happen, the institution has to work hard at building trust, thus regaining belief and engagement from individual academics on the ground. This is where strategic planning should come in, with the aim of embedding interpersonal relationships not just in individual networks but also institutional structures. Hence, an approach to linking the strategic and contingent through interpersonal relationships is thus proposed in order to build sustainable international partnerships in higher education.

However, this research showed that there are subtle differences in how the strategic and contingent is linked through interpersonal relationships between the two institutions in the UK and China. In England, sustainable partnership seems constructed amid the distrust in the institution by participants as a response with frustration, cynicism and doubt about the institutional approach to partnerships driven by income generation, arguing that it is human relationships between ‘people’ that make partnerships sustainable. Thus in the English context partnerships were embedded in the individual networks rather than in the institutional structure, possibly making them more fragile. In China, meanwhile, sustainable partnership appears constructed in the context with a heavy reliance on the particular roles of ‘people’ – ‘senior’ academics – working in either home or partner universities in developing and sustaining interpersonal relationships and thus partnerships. Albeit the differences, this shared understanding of sustainable partnerships across two universities in both countries is argued to go beyond any international and institutional differences between the UK and China, thus creating wider possibilities of constructing sustainable partnerships through interpersonal relationships in the international higher education.

Author Bio

Dr. Jie Ma is a postdoctoral researcher at Xiamen University. She has a PhD in Internationalization of Higher Education and has research interests in the field of comparative education. Her doctoral research was on constructions of sustainable international partnerships in higher education, which includes perspectives from the UK and China. The current research project that she is engaging in is on the traditions and transitions of undergraduate teaching in the UK higher education. She can be contacted via email at irisma0407@163.com.