SemesterFall Semester, 2020
DepartmentMA Program of Ethnology, First Year PhD Program of Ethnology, First Year MA Program of Ethnology, Second Year PhD Program of Ethnology, Second Year
Course NameMigration, Labor and Digital Media in Contemporary China
InstructorLIU TZU KAI
Credit3.0
Course TypeElective
Prerequisite
Course Objective
Course Description
Course Schedule

 



 


































































































































































Week



Topic



Content and Reading Assignment



Teaching Activities and Homework



Student workload expectation



In-class Hours



Outside-of-class Hours



1



(9/17)



Introduction:



Key Issues in the Study of Labor Migration and Digital Media



Prinsloo, Mastin



2017 Spatiotemporal Scales and the Study of Mobility. In The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language. Suresh Canagarajah, ed. Pp. 364-380.



 



Nyiri, Pal



2010 Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China.



[Read]



Chapter 1: Internal Migration in Reform China.



Chapter 2: International Migration from China.



Lecture, Discussion



3



2



2



(9/24)



Labor, Ideology and Political Economy in the Age of Social Media



Fuchs, Christian



2015 Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Routledge.



[Read]



Chapter 2: Culture and Work. (by Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval)



Chapter 3: Communication, Ideology, and Labour



Chapter 4: Social Media and Labour Time



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



3



(10/1)



Mid-Autumn Festival



(No Class)



 



 



 



4



(10/8)



Productive Labor and Social Media



Fuchs, Christian



2015 Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media.



[Read]



Chapter 5: Social Media and Productive Labour



Chapter 6: Social Media’s International Division of Digital Labour.



Chapter 7: Baidu, Weibo, and Renren: The Global Political Economy of



Social Media in China.



 



Terranova, Tiziana



2000 Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 18(2): 33-58.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



5



(10/15)



Digital Labor, Exploitation and Informational Capitalism



Calvão, Filipe



2016 “Unfree Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 451-472.



 



De Kosnik, Abigail



2013 Fandom as Free Labor. In Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Trebor Scholz, ed. Pp. 98-111.



 



Fuchs, Christian



2014 Digital Labor and Karl Marx.



[Read]



Chapter 11: Theorizing Digital Labour on Social Media.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



6



(10/22)



Digital Working Class and Migrant Workers in China



Dai, X.



2003 ICTs in China’s Development Strategy. In China and the Internet Politics of the Digital Leap Forward. C. R. Hughes and G. Wacker, eds. Pp. 8-29.



 



Qiu, Jack Linchuan



2009 Working-class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China.



 



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



7



(10/29)



Migration, Precarity and (Dis)empowerment



Han, Clara



2018 Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability. Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 331-343.



 



Schierup, Carl-Ulrik and Martin Bak Jørgensen



2018 From ‘Social Exclusion’ to ‘Precarity’. The Becoming-migrant of Labour: An Introduction. In Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences. Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen, eds. Pp. 1-29.



Chicago: Haymarket Books.



 



Lee, Ching Kwan



2016 Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China. The Journal of Asian Studies 75(2): 317-333.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



8



(11/5)



Female Migrant Labor, Suzhi Discourse and Post-socialist China



Yan, Hairong



2008 New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press.



[Read]



Chapter 3: Suzhi as a New Value: Neoliberal Governance of Labor Migration.



 



Kipnis, Andrew



2007 Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People’s Republic of China. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute



13(2): 383-400.



 



Gaetano, Arianne M.



2015 Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China. University of Hawaii Press.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



9



(11/12)



Migration, Transnational Family and Care



Francisco-Menchavez, Valerie



2018 The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



10



(11/19)



Migrants, Family, Feminism and Masculinity



Binah-Pollak, Avital



2019 Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.



 



Lin, Xiaodong



2013 Gender, Modernity and Male Migrant Workers in China: Becoming a 'Modern' Man.



 



Newendrop, Nicole D.



2008 Uneasy Renions: Immigration, Citizenship and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong.



Chapter 1: Split-Families, Reunited Families and Political Difference.



Chapter 2: The Moral and Legal Landscape of Reuniting Families in Hong Kong.



Chapter 3: Mainland Wives, Hong Kong Husbands.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



11



(11/26)



Midterm Exam



 



 



3



8



12



(12/3)



Migrants, Gender and Technomobility



Wallis, Cara



2013 Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



13



(12/10)



Affective Labor, Gender and Photography



Lukács, Gabriella



2020 Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy.



Chapter 1: Disidentifications: Women, Photography and Everyday Patriarchy.



Chapter 2: The Labor of Cute: New Idols in the Digital Economy.



Chapter 5: Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Affective Labor and Precarity Politics.



Conclusion: Digital Labor, Labor Precarity and Basic Income.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



14



(12/17)



Digital Labor, Gig Economy and Platform Economy



Rosenbalt, Alex



2018 Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work.



Chapter 1: Driving as Glamorous Labor.



Chapter 2: Motivations to Drive.



Chapter 5: Behind the Curtain.



 



Scholz, Trebor



2016 Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy.



[Read]



Chapter 1: Waged Labor and the End of Employment.



 



Widlok, Thomas



2017 Anthropology and The Economy of Sharing. London: Routledge.



Chapter 6: Introducing the Sharing Economy.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



15



(12/24)



Digital Nationalism, Sovereignty and Governmentality



Schneider, Florian



2018 China’s Digital Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



[Read]



Chapter 1: Introduction.



Chapter 2: Nationalism and Its Digital Modes.



Chapter 4: Digital China’s Hyperlink Networks.



Chapter 8: The Cultural Governance of Digital China.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



16



(12/31)



Rural Migrants and Factory Town



Gong, Yue



2018 Manufacturing Towns in China: The Governance of Rural Migrant Workers.



[Read]



Chapter 1: Introduction: Governance, Rural Migrants and Manufacturing Towns.



Chapter 7: As Eco-High-Tech Town: Governing Rural Migrants to Become Skilled Workers.



 



Zavoretti, Roberta



2017 Rural Origins, City Lives: Class and Place in Contemporary China. 



[Read]



Introduction: The Paradigm of Rural to Urban Migration in Contemporary



China.



Chapter 1: Who is a Peasant Worker?



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



17



(1/7)



Foreign Migrants and Urban Otherness



Mathews, Gordon, Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang



2017 The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



[Read]



Introduction.



Chapter 2: Foreigners in Guangzhou.



Chapter 5: Legal-Illegal in Guangzhou.



Lecture, Discussion



3



8



18



(1/14)



Final Project In-class Presentation



 



 



 



 




 


Teaching Methods
Teaching Assistant
Requirement/Grading

Class Attendance/Participation/Discussion 15%



Discussion Questions (12%)



Article Presentations (3 times) (18%)



Final Project Presentation 15%



Midterm Exam 20%



    Final Paper 20%


Textbook & Reference

[Required Text] 指定書目



Fuchs, Christian



2014 Digital Labor and Karl Marx. London: Routledge.



2015 Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Routledge.



Scholz, Trebor ed.



2013 Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge.



Qiu, Jack Linchuan



2009 Working-class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China. Cambridge: MIT Press.



Pun, Ngai



2016 Migrant Labor in China: Post-socialist Transformations. Cambridge: Polity.



Yan, Hairong



2008 New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press.



Ling, Minhua



2019 The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai’s Edge. Stanford: Stanford University Press.



Francisco-Menchavez, Valerie



2018 The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.



Wallis, Cara



2013 Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York: NYU Press.



Agrawa, Ravi



2018 India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World's Largest Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Schneider, Florian



2018 China’s Digital Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Widlok, Thomas



2017 Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing. London: Routledge.



 



[Recommended Texts] 推薦書目



Smets, Kevin, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala, eds.



2019 The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration. Thousand Oaks: Sage.



Pido, Eric J.



2017 Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity. Durham: Duke University Press.



Binah-Pollak, Avital



2019 Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.



Mathews, Gordon, Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang



2017 The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



  Lukács, Gabriella



  2020 Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy.   



  Durham: Duke University Press.



   Guo, Shaohua



   2020 The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public. Stanford:



   Stanford University Press.


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