Gender, Class, and Community Mobilization for Education in China's Migrant Communities

• In Event: Reimaging Community-Based Inquiries and Decolonizing Knowledge Production in Transnational Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
This paper discusses the challenges and rewards of migrant teachers and community activists, most of them women, in representing the needs and interests of their communities to explore what kinds of schooling is worthwhile for migrant children. 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.
Theoretical Framework
This paper uses the theoretical lenses of intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1991) and third world feminism (Mohanty, 2003) to document the transformation in China’s migrant communities. It 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. A large number of research literature that conceptualizes mobilization in relation to direct political action is generated in Western contexts. The various forms of collective actions and mobilization in Chinese urban migrant communities have yet be considered as political movements. The activities organized by women teachers and community activists have to largely reply on the personal networks they have built and new social media platforms they have maintained. By analyzing migrant community’s activism, this paper seeks to demonstrate a more nuanced understanding of community mobilization in non-Western context—in this case is the Chinese migrant communities—as it pertains to the education for migrant children.
Modes of Inquiry and Data
In this paper, I focus on the practices of women teachers and community activists who work closely with migrant students to examine the struggles and agency of migrant teachers that are subject to China’s household registration system, hukou (Chan & Zhang, 1999) as well as the politics of gender and class. 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.
Substantiated Conclusions
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. 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.
Significance
This paper 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. 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.

Author

• Min Yu, Wayne State University