【会议预告】“21世纪的性别与城市”国际工作坊

      A two-day workshop focusing on the intersection of gender studies and urban studies that brings together researchers from HKMU, the GenUrb project, and scholars from universities in China: 

Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong;

New York University Shanghai, Shanghai;

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai;

Shanghai University, Shanghai;

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;

The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai; and

Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou.

I. Gender Dynamics of Hypergamy: Insights from Parents in Shanghai’s Matchmaking Corner

Prof. Yingchun JI and Prof. C. Cindy FAN

Abstract:

Professor Yingchun JI

 Shanghai University 

      Professor Yingchun JI is the Eastern Scholar Professor at the School of Sociology and Political Science at Shanghai University. As a family sociologist and social demographer, Ji obtained her PhD in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her interests include family sociology, social demography, gender, health studies, and quantitative and mixed methods. She has published in journals in multiple disciplines, including sociology, family studies, population studies, and health studies. Through empirical-based research, she seeks to conceptualize and theorize family and gender dynamics in transitional societies such as China. One of her goals is to integrate literature on gender, family, and health studies, applying gender perspectives and family theories to health research. Her current research projects include the reinstitutionization of marriage in China, gender dynamics in transitional China, and China’s recent two-child family policy.

Professor C. Cindy FAN

The University of California, Los Angeles

      Professor C. Cindy FAN is UCLA’s Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement, Professor of Geography and formerly Associate Dean of Social Sciences. As UCLA’s senior international officer, she oversees the university’s global partnerships, twenty-seven interdisciplinary research centers, and eight degree programs within the International Institute. She received her PhD from the Ohio State University and an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Bristol. Fan has numerous publications on migration, gender, and regional development in China, including the pioneering book China on the Move. She has received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and major research grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and National Science Foundation, and is an elected member of the National Academy of International Education.

Abstract

      In this keynote presentation, the authors, both feminist geographers, draw on their recent and ongoing work to make a case for theorizing women’s work as an essential component of citymaking within Asian contexts. They argue that cities within Asia provide for a specific labor extractive context resting upon the prevailing socio-cultural setting, and a history of colonialism. Such a setting allows for a constant extraction of women’s waged, care and sexual labor. In fact, it is women’s work, that links bodies, households, neighborhoods and communities across the city’s breadth and beyond, much like a connective tissue and hence an essential component of citymaking.

Speakers:

Professor Anindita DATTA (Right)

The University of Delhi

Professor Swagata BASU (Left)

SSV College

      Professor Anindita DATTA is Professor at the Department of Geography, University of Delhi and Past Chair, IGU Commission on Gender and Geography. She is the first Asian (and Indian) woman to be elected as Vice President, IGU. Her work focusses on gendered and epistemic violence, feminist dissidence, spaces of resistance and geographies of care. Prof Datta has successfully introduced new curriculum in the area of geography of gender, published consistently in internationally known peer reviewed journals with an interdisciplinary perspective, served as member International editorial boards for Gender, Place & Culture andSocial & Cultural Geography. Prof. Datta has been invited as visiting faculty to the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden under the Linnaeus Palme program, has held an Erasmus Mundus fellowship and been invited to deliver talks and keynotes at the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers, UK, NTNU Norway, University of Bordeaux, France, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, NIAS and University of Copenhagen, Denmark, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Nara Women’s University, Japan among others. She is currently Associate Editor of Dialogues in Human Geography; IGU deputy representative to the Standing Committee on Gender Equality in Sciences; and recipient of the 2023 Jan Monk Service Award for her contributions to feminist geography. Her recent books include Gender Space and Agency in India: Exploring Regional Genderscapes and the co-edited volumes Elgar Handbook on Gender and Cities, Bridging Worlds Building Feminist Geographies and Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies. A soldier’s daughter, Anindita grew up in different cantonment towns and has travelled continuously across India leaving her with a finely honed spatial imagination that throws up startling insights in her explorations of space and place. She sees no contradiction in her role as mother of three and hands on feminist geographer. 

      Professor Swagata BASU is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography at SSV College, Hapur, India. Swagata’s research interests are in the areas of Violence against Women (VAW) and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), as well as issues related to women’s rights to the city. Swagata works closely with women’s organizations that are associated with women's livelihood issues in low-income urban neighborhoods. Swagata is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the International Geographical Union’s Commission for Gender and Geography. Swagata has published her research in many national and international journals, edited books, and presented her research at various international conferences in India and abroad.  

Abstract

      Social reproduction is a geographically and historically differentiated process encompassing the production of a stratified labor force and the cultural forms and practices that create and maintain its differences while making them common sense. It involves both the sensuous labor of everyday life and the structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation to production. These material social practices take place across geographic and temporal scales, encompassing daily and generational relations that are as much intimate as global in their effects and charge. Social reproduction also involves the reproduction of the material grounds and conditions of production, including the built environment, the conservation of environmental resources and the concerns of environmental justice. The work of social reproduction is racialized, gendered and class specific, and is accomplished within a contested and shifting amalgam that includes the family, household, state, workplace, and institutions of civil society including schools, courts, and prisons. My presentation will offer a critical discussion of these concerns, with particular emphasis on gender and the city, drawing connections among sites and practices that foster healthy, housed, and secure social reproduction.

Speaker:

Professor Cindi KATZ

The City University of New York

      Professor Cindi KATZ is Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (2004) which won the American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (1993), Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (2004), and The People, Place, and Space Reader (with Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert) (2014). The 2024 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Honor and the 2021 recipient of Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG, Katz held a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2003-4), and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011-12). She is working on two book projects: Childhood as Spectacle and a collection of her writings on social reproduction tentatively titled Vagabond Capitalism: Social Reproduction in Crisis.