Date and time: Friday 1 November 2024, 13:00 - 14:30 Room: IM201, Al-Qasimi building
This talk theorizes affective forms of citizenship exclusion among migrant workers in the Shanghai construction industry. Located in the context of Chinese rural-urban migration, I understand the exclusions of citizenship and spatial boundaries of China’s largest city through the everyday, affective experience of unbelonging among migrant workers actively involved in building the city itself. In doing so, I argue that exclusions from (urban) citizenship are not primarily activated or made real through formal, legalistic demarcations of difference, but rather through the intimate, embodied, and emotional aspects of everyday experience. In particular, I consider the ways that access to urban space in Shanghai is felt and experienced in fine-grained, affective, and practical ways among men who remain excluded from urban citizenship despite their long presence there. Because construction workers’ presence in the city as urban noncitizens is necessary for the reproduction of the urban built environment, formal, informal, and internalized restrictions on spatial access mark crucial boundaries of urban citizenship that persist even as formal boundaries are ostensibly eroded.
Speaker: Leif Johnson is an assistant professor of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. His research focuses on the affective and gendered aspects of migration and border-making across multiple contexts, from the creation of boundaries facilitating infrastructure construction in urban Shanghai, to new modes of low-cost transnational mobility among Chinese migrants in transit through Latin America.
Registration link: https://forms.gle/E7szcfuU9dnyWVrf8
