Asia as Method and the Reflection on Research in and about China’s Migrant Communities

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Selves as Methods: Reflexive Dialogue and Praxis in Global Knowledge Production

Proposal

Knowledge production in Asia has often been trapped in an oppositional binary, such as: China versus the West, Japan versus the West, or India versus the West. Often times, this dichotomous way of countering Western hegemony ends up being a reproduction of hegemonic and colonialized desire (Chen, 2010), Takayama et al. (2017) argue that the challenge is to move away from “thin inclusion” of diverse scholars and texts and towards a “thick inclusion.” One should focus on moving closer toward “epistemic reflexivity, which is a focus on how things can be known” (Takayama et al., 2017, p. s16). Such efforts echo other calls from Asian postcolonial scholars for overcoming “unproductive anxieties” (Chen, 2010) and developing new paths of engagement, which propose previously-decentered ways to shift the points of reference without fixing on the Western, instead looking at other parts of the Global South to learn and reflect.

This paper engages in a theoretical reflection on how to move beyond imposing the Eurocentric theories onto Southern and Eastern examples (e.g. Connell, 2007; Lin, 2012; Shahjahan, 2005; Takayama, 2016; Zhang et al., 2015). Specifically, I reflect on my journey as both an insider and outsider in order to engage in a critical examination of educational issues produced within Chinese contexts and influenced by local and global cultural, economic, and regional politics. My analysis of collective actions for education in China’s migrant community calls for attention to examine the relationship between the state and society and to rethink key concepts such as civil society and public sphere in the Chinese context. This paper seeks to recapitulate certain key arguments and findings from some of my previous writing, in order to reread them through the theoretical lens of “Asia as method” and advance a discussion concerning the politics of knowledge production in educational research that is both in and about China.

I have moved through different social and academic spaces that are unevenly hierarchical and my search for transnational spaces of knowledge also inevitably “entangled with complicity, nationalism, and continuing work of old and new imperialism” (Rhee, 2013, p. 330). At the same time, the complex positionality of a researcher, as Ghaffar-Kucher (2015) identifies, is “especially acute when the research is on an understudied community or is politically charged because of the paucity of research or polarizing viewpoints that exist in that realm” (p. 1187). Thus, this paper aims to work towards a reflection of applying “Asia as Method” to the interpretation and theorization of questions regarding the educational and social issues faced by marginalized migrant communities in contemporary Chinese society. Such reflection allows me to recognize my own positionality within transnational knowledge production arenas. The goal herein is not merely to replace the West/North with the East/South or generate some type of universalistic theoretical concept (Chen, 2010); instead, the task I undertake in this work is to reflect how to foster more robust and historically grounded conceptual explanations and to recognize my own positionality within transnational knowledge production arenas.

Author

• Min Yu, Wayne State University