Intersectionality in China's Migrant Community

• In Event: 31.019 - Intersectionality and Transnational Education Research for a New World Order?

Abstract

This paper discusses what kinds of schooling is worthwhile for migrant children and what should be included in school curriculum for migrant children in urban China. A key point here is that this longitudinal ethnography reveals the challenges and rewards of migrant teachers and community activists, most of them women, constructing school curriculum that fit the needs and interests of the communities. And it places special emphasis on the discussion of how experiences and the lives shape perspectives that expose inequities in class, gender, and power in China’s migrant communities.
This paper theorizes the ways “multiply-marginalized persons and groups” (Choo & Ferree, 2010) are intertwined in a “matrix of domination” (Collins, 2000) that are situated within marginalized spaces. In the critical pedagogy tradition, school is part of a political space that teachers reflect on their own beliefs and perspectives and navigate through various pedagogical actions to empower their students to engage in social change (Freire, 1970). In this paper, I critically engage my own journey as scholars-practitioners and bring the practices of women teachers and community activists who work closely with migrant students to examine how their local acts of collective actions changed students’ and other community members’ perceptions of who they are, what they can do, and how they can do it.
I acknowledge the struggles and agency of migrant teachers that are subject to China’s household registration system (hukou). The teachers in this study are from migrant communities who lack the legal documents, the urban hukou. My longitudinal ethnographic study documents how migrant teachers develop solidarity and form community-based organizations to support one another and their students. By describing their struggles over recognition and representation (Fraser, 1997) in the society, I argue that the transformation of the identity among migrant teachers set the foundation for more profound grass-root mobilization within the migrant communities as it pertains to education equity for migrant children.
This paper also further indicates that the complexities or nuances of situations of migrant communities and that categories for considering the quality of education should be derived from the contexts. To illustrate this, I address how the efforts of migrant teachers reflect the messages of being regarded as unofficial, in view of the fact that an emerging movement of migrant schooling focused on providing for the emotional, cultural, and social rights of students and their community through collective actions.
Given the increasingly transnational mobility of people, culture, and ideas, it has become critically important to re-center and learn from the experiences of migrant communities that have been in the margins in the transnational spaces. This paper discusses what counts as official curriculum for migrant children with empirical evidence that shows a shift in individual and local level resistance. Furthermore, this research reflects my goal to advocate for a paradigm shift in education research as it pertains to centering the active agency of migrant communities.

Authors

• Min Yu, Wayne State University

• Danielle V. Lewis, University at Buffalo - SUNY