East Asia – Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

We are delighted to share the publication of a new book by our director Dr Cora Lingling Xu. Read this profile (in Chinese) with People Magazine 《人物》杂志 and blog post to learn about the personal stories behind this book.

Please find an abstract of ‘The Time Inheritors‘ and critical reviews below.

If you wish to order this book, you can use SNWS25 to get 30% off when you order from the SUNY Press website.

To learn more about the book talks and interviews visit this page. Listen to the New Books Network’s interview with Cora. 听’时差In-Betweenness’与Cora的对话（小宇宙链接）. Check out this page for frequently asked questions (e.g. what you should do if you wish to write a book review) about this book. Share your stories of ‘time inheritance’. If you wish to contact Cora about arranging book talks and interviews, complete this contact form.

Abstract

Can a student inherit time? What difference does time make to their educational journeys and outcomes? The Time Inheritors draws on nearly a decade of field research with more than one hundred youth in China to argue that intergenerational transfers of privilege or deprivation are manifested in and through time. Comparing experiences of rural-to-urban, cross-border, and transnational education, Cora Lingling Xu shows how inequalities in time inheritance help drive deeply unequal mobility. With its unique focus on time, nuanced comparative analysis, and sensitive ethnographic engagement, The Time Inheritors opens new avenues for understanding the social mechanisms shaping the future of China and the world.

Critical reviews

“Xu’s conceptually sophisticated monograph reveals how intersectional inequalities are constructed, experienced, and transmitted temporally, with special reference to education. Through the vivid stories of students in mainland China and Hong Kong, and Chinese international students, Xu brings to life different individuals’ ‘time inheritances,’ demonstrating the exciting possibilities time offers as a lens for innovative thinking about inequality. A must-read for sociologists and anthropologists of education, China, and time.” — Rachel Murphy, author of The Children of China’s Great Migration

“Innovative and ambitious, The Time Inheritors proposes a time-centric framework that brings together analyses of social structure, history, individual behavior, and affect. We often feel we are fighting for time. But, as Cora Xu argues in this important study of Chinese students, the scarcity of time is not a given or universal. Different experiences of time result in part from the varying amounts of time we inherit from the previous generation. Time inheritance is therefore critical to the reproduction of social inequality.” — Biao Xiang, coauthor of Self as Method: Thinking through China and the World

“Cora Lingling Xu offers a groundbreaking analysis of educational inequality and social mobility in contemporary China. Xu centers the voices of marginalized students throughout, providing poignant insights into their lived experiences of rural poverty, urban precarity, and educational alienation. At the same time, Xu’s comparative scope reveals how even seemingly privileged groups can be constrained by the temporal logics of social reproduction. The Time Inheritors is a must-read for scholars, educators, and policymakers concerned with educational equity and social justice. Xu’s lucid prose and engaging case studies make the book accessible to a wide audience while her cutting-edge theoretical framework and methodological rigor set a new standard for research on education and inequality.” — Chris R. Glass, coeditor of Critical Perspectives on Equity and Social Mobility in Study Abroad: Interrogating Issues of Unequal Access and Outcomes

“By centering the temporal dimension of who is advantaged or disadvantaged, how, why, and with what consequences, The Time Inheritors takes a unique and powerful approach. Not only does the book contribute theoretically and empirically to our understanding of class inequalities but it also resonates deeply. The inclusion of Chinese translations and characters will give Chinese readers a rich, nuanced cultural appreciation of her findings.” — Dan Cui, author of Identity and Belonging among Chinese Canadian Youth: Racialized Habitus in School, Family, and Media

“An extremely well-written, theoretically informed, and compelling volume that represents a major contribution to the study of education, migration, and social inequality in China and beyond. The Time Inheritors proposes a bold and innovative framework—that of time inheritance—to open the black box of social inequality’s temporal dimension. Whereas the relatively privileged classes inherit temporal wealth and strategies that enable them to bank and save time, facilitating their mobility, the time poor lack this inheritance, forcing them into a vicious cycle of wasting time and paying back temporal debts. Drawing from a rich palette of vivid and intimate longitudinal case studies, The Time Inheritors unpacks the complex intersections between familial, national, and global time inequalities.” — Zachary M. Howlett, author of Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China

Release Dates

Hardcover: 1st April 2025

Paperback: 1st October 2025

2022 East Asian Anthropological Association (EAAA) Annual Meeting
National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
October 15-17, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the world since its spread in 2020, disconnecting families, societies, economies, as well as anthropologists from their fieldsites. East Asia, where this crisis first emerged, is also the region which has weathered the crisis most successfully, although not without controversy. In 2022, in the context of new border regimes, new forms of (distanced) intimacy, and precarious supply chains, people are finding new ways to (re)-connect with each other. Anthropologists in East Asia and across the world find there is no simple “returning to normal” fieldwork, but search for new ways of making and sustaining connections. This Call for Papers invites anthropologists and related scholars to deliberate on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing impact and other emerging challenges that are crucial to our concern in East Asia.

How can anthropology illuminate the many ways people are seeking to reconnect and re-establish intimacies with others in a new context? More importantly, how might an “ethnographic sensibility” help us understand the different and sometimes contradictory ways people reconnect their worlds and establish new futures? A lingering and seemingly never-ending crisis not only challenges people’s lives and governance, it also generates a space for reflecting on humanistic concerns, and yearning either for pasts imagined to have been less precarious, or for imagined futures which might be realized. Defining the stakes of the crisis, rebuilding intimacies and making critiques look very differently depending on whether one is a laborer, investor, student, migrant, farmer, health worker, fisherman, activist, ritual specialist, politician, male, female, straight, queer, or transgendered (to only name a few).

We invite submissions from anthropologists from East Asia working in East Asia on a broad range of topics related to crisis, intimacy, and critique in reconnecting Asia. Recommended topics include the following:

1) Anthropocene in East Asia: The biopolitics of epidemics and medicine; climate change; human-animal and human-plant relations; landscapes; environmentalism; debates on sustainable development; the anthropology of food; food sovereignty and activism; the manufacturing of the senses; health and quality of life; alternative forms of life.

2) Social and Political Movements: Propaganda and political discourse; the struggles and strategies of indigenous peoples, recognition, social justice; migrant labor; anti-imperialism; populism; nationalism and patriotism; race and ethnicity; the politics of liberalism and illiberalism.

3) Intimacy, Hope and Anxiety: Affect; the end of intimacy; connectivity; political intimacy; spiritual belonging; religious revivalism; global health and education; community sustainability; psychological well-being; happiness and suffering; care and caring; burn out; communicability, stigma and xenophobia; active ageing; quality of life.

4) Digital Technology and Network Society: Digital ethnography, surveillance capitalism; net armies and “fake news”; technocracy and pandemic control; border and entry control; artificial intelligence; big data and censorship; incarceration; the metaverse and the future of social media; infrastructure; equality and inequality.

5) Global East Asia: Suspended globalization; regrouping; reopening; democracy; vaccine equity and hesitancy; socialism; capitalism; neoliberalism; disrupted supply chains; the inflation crisis; mobility and migration; cultural heritage and cultural revivalism; transnational movements for and against race, gender and LGBTQ+ equality.

Please fill in the online Submission Form (preferred); or download the submission form, fill in it, and send it back to taipeimeeting@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is May 31, 2022.

Individual Papers:

Online submission or download form

Proposed Panel:

Online submission or download form

The registration fee is US$50 (non-student) or US$20 (student), which includes receptions and meals during the conference (October 15-16). Participants need to pay for their own travel and lodging. We are reserving rooms at two guesthouses/hotels and participants can choose the types of room and register with the hotels at their convenience. The availability of reserved rooms will be first come, first served. Participants can also arrange their own lodging. Further information on conference registration, lodging, and the optional post-conference tour will be delivered in two months after the submission deadline.

Due to the lingering uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, we list a 4-step application procedure and dates below for your attention:

Step 1: Submit Individual Paper or Proposed Panel by May 31, 2022.

Step 2: Receive Acceptance Notification and related information by July 31, 2022.

Step 3: Submit Post-conference Tour Form by August 31, 2022.

Step 4: Pay registration fee in order to keep presentation in the conference program by September 15, 2022.

We look forward to your submission for joining the 2022 EAAA in Taipei this October!

managing editor: Zhiyun Bian

Tag: East Asia

Call for Papers: Asia Re-Connecting? Crisis, Intimacy and Critique