Book Launch: Women Migrants in Southern China and in Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions

Beatrice Zani

This session will be held using Microsoft Teams .

*Please be aware that this session follows Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) .

Abstract

This book, based on extensive original research, explores the lives, the migratory experiences and the social, economic, and emotional practices of Chinese migrant women during their migrations and mobilities in China, from China to Taiwan, from Taiwan to China and in between the two countries. It illustrates how women on the move experience social contempt, misrecognition and economic marginalisation; how women migrants seek autonomy, economic independence, upward social mobility and modernity, but discover the Chinese inegalitarian social order and labour regimes which produce obstacles and impede their ambitions; and how old and new forms of subalternity are reproduced. Overall, the book emphasises what it feels like for the women migrants as they negotiate their way at the crossroad between subalternity and resistance, between subordinated labour and independent, digital entrepreneurship, and between an inegalitarian labour market and new, online opportunities for business and commerce.

For more infomation about the book, click here .

Speaker's Bio

Beatrice is a sociologist, postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University, Department of East-Asian studies. She is research associate at the European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT, Tuebingen University), and at TRIANGLE (ENS Lyon, France). She is also Board member of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) and of the network ‘Migration’ of the French Sociological Association (AFS). Her ongoing research focuses migrant e-entrepreneurs’ the digitalised and transnational trade which connects Taiwan to China and South-East to elucidate the link between migration, emotion and ICT in the making of capitalism and globalisation. Her work has been recently awarded: the Mobility Prize by the Forum Mobile Lives; the Lyon 2 University Dissertation Award, and the Young Author Award by the journal Sociologie du travail (Sociology of Work). Her most recent publications include: ‘Shall WeChat? Switching between online and offline ethnography’ (Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, 2021)’; ‘Digital Entrepreneurship. E-commerce among Chinese Marriage-Migrant Women in Taiwan’ (Journal of Chinese Overseas, 2021); ‘Pattes de poulet, colis cachés, entrepreneuses connectées. Migration et entrepreneuriat digital entre Chine et Taiwan’ (Sociologie du travail, 2021) ; ‘Can the Subaltern Feel ? An ethnography of migration, subalternity and emotion’ (with L. Momesso, Emotion, Space and Society, 2021); ‘WeChat, We sell, we feel: Chinese migrant women’s emotional petit capitalism’ (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020).

Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: hl55@soas.ac.uk