Browsing by Subject "Global South"
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Item The Danger and Power of Being In-Between: Rural-Urban Inbetweener Identity in Contemporary China(2019-07) Zhang, ChenIn 2015, United Nation Habitat estimated that 1.5 million people globally were moving from the countryside to the city every week. They are often regarded as living in a seemingly “transient” or “liminal” status. Their ambiguous status of identity and place has long been taken for granted as temporary, exceptional, unstable, undesirable, vulnerable, or dangerous in both state-dominant political discourse and critical urbanists’ scholarly examinations. However, my research finds that a community of Chinese rural-to-urban migrants challenge this assertion and pursue a right to permanently inhabit this seemingly undesirable status between rural and urban. They identify themselves as rural-urban “inbetweeners,” build “in-between” informal settlements on the rural-urban periphery and mobilize themselves to sustain an inbetweener identity as a permanent and positive identity. Inbetweeners’ pursuit of the right to permanently inhabit a seemingly transient, ambiguous, and marginal status poses a puzzling question: Why do migrants pursue an in-between social status which has been widely viewed as dangerous and disadvantageous? To solve this puzzle, my dissertation explores two research questions: 1) Why do migrants decide to become inbetweeners? 2) What do migrants do with this inbetweener identity in their everyday life practices and collective resistance? Drawing on data from my in-depth interviews with two inbetweener communities and my observations of their anti-formalization and anti-eviction movements in two Chinese cities — Chengdu and Beijing — from 2016 to 2018, this dissertation reveals a nested set of logics behind migrants’ decision to construct, preserve, and deploy an inbetweener identity. I found that migrants’ decision to identify themselves as inbetweeners was born from their resistance to be identified by the dominant discourse as an inferior group — the floating population (in Chinese, liudong renkou). To replace this floating people identity, migrants created this inbetweener identity. By identifying themselves as inbetweeners, migrants don’t say a simple “no” to their social and spatial status between rural and urban; instead, they find potential in this seemingly disadvantageous rural-urban in-between status. Inbetweeners deploy their identity to achieve material benefits, escape the gaze of state power, and create an alternative social belonging beyond a rural-urban category. This inbetweener identity signals both danger and opportunities for migrants in their everyday life. These findings enrich scholarship on critical urban theory, modernist and postmodern planning theory, and interpretative methods in urban studies. First, these findings challenge critical urbanists’ etic assertion about migrants’ general desire to move from a “liminal” status between rural and urban to a more stable and permanent urban status. Instead, I found that a rural-urban in-between status signals both danger and power from migrants’ emic perspective. It can be simultaneously exclusive and empowering. By constructing and deploying this inbetweener identity, migrants are able to strategically and flexibly respond to and resist the multifaceted repercussions produced by a rapid urbanization process. Second, this dissertation criticizes a modernist planning mode that overly relies on a series of spatial and non-spatial oppositions, including rural/urban, inclusion/exclusion, and past/future, to index and explain social differences. Drawing from the danger and power experienced by rural-to-urban migrants who live and straddle between rural and urban societies, I argue that planners should treat a rapidly urbanizing society as a contradictory whirlpool in which marginalization, exclusion, and exploitation paradoxically coexist with material opportunities, liberating potentials, and new modes of social belonging. Third, this study demonstrates another way in which interpretative method is a promising approach for investigating previously neglected dimensions of urbanization in people’s everyday life practices and their meaning-making processes.Item Immigration news in the Global South: A comparative analysis of media content and journalistic decisions and practices in Latin America(2020-08) Severino, FernandoThis dissertation analyzes the news media representation of intraregional immigration in Latin America in connection with the journalistic decisions that partially shape this content. Based on an analysis of 1,690 news articles from 16 print and web outlets in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico (sampled from a database created uniquely for this dissertation), this project examines frames, word choices, sources, and other elements of news stories from 2014-2018. It also uses twenty interviews with journalists in these countries ––working for the news outlets analyzed here–– to establish relationships between the coverage produced in these newsrooms and the approach reporters take to write about immigration. Overall, the findings show a predominant presence of two frames in the way news media decides to tell the story about immigration: A victim – humanitarian/human rights frame and a political responsibility–policy solutions and debates frame. These frames are heavily influenced by governmental voices and official messages that are the sources most used by reporters. News articles about the benefits of immigrants and immigration are minimal. The lack of specialization in newsrooms about reporting immigration, limited resources, and the context of violence negatively impact the presence of counternarratives to the official discourse. However, there is an agreement among journalists on writing about immigration in ways that avoid promoting xenophobia and stereotyping. Thus, the storytelling does not use charged labels about the newcomers, and concepts such as "illegality" are virtually absent. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation provides arguments about the role of professional journalism and journalists in developing countries as a crucial institution for democracy. From a more practical perspective, this project's results could benefit the work of reporters writing about immigration across newsrooms in the Global South.Item The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Capital and Migration In South Africa(2018-06) Huang, MingweiIn light of the People’s Republic of China’s reemergence on the African continent since 2000, my dissertation, The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Migration and Capital in South Africa, explores the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of contemporary Chinese migration and capital in South Africa from an interdisciplinary approach grounded in feminist and critical race studies. Based on the analysis of media and cultural texts, in-depth interviews, and extensive participant-observation fieldwork primarily sited at a “China Mall,” a wholesale shopping center for Chinese goods, and Chinatown in Johannesburg, my dissertation theorizes the “south-south” dynamics of the “Rise of China.” It argues that Chinese capital in South Africa is an emergent form of 21st century racial capitalism and empire that functions through neoliberal modes of flexibility, mobility, and risk-taking and the production of racial difference. My dissertation tells a novel story about aspiring Chinese entrepreneurs who chase economic ambitions unattainable to them in neoliberalizing China in the emerging markets for low-cost Chinese goods in South Africa and across Africa and Latin America, while reproducing the enduring social inequalities and power relations foundational to South Africa’s history of racial capitalism and colonialism. The dissertation chronicles not only transnational Chinese livelihoods in South Africa, but also the fraught intimate and non-intimate encounters between Chinese and Africans, and the experiences of precarious Southern Africans migrant workers at the mall. It emphasizes the multiplicity of economic forms, affective economies, socialities, and historical contingencies. A feminist ethnography of racial capitalism, it tracks practices of capital accumulation, transnational capital flows, and labor relations alongside the production of racial, gender, and sexual difference necessary for the maximization of profit. The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism theorizes contemporary processes of racialization and neoliberal global capitalism across seldom examined yet increasingly important south-south geographies, while engaging racial capitalism scholarship with often elided analysis of gender and sexuality.