About the Event
In this talk, Professor PUN Ngai will explore the existence of social values that are practiced by the Chinese working-class youth as an alternative form of agency and every-day practices. Employing in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in vocational schools in China, at sites for the nurturing of working-class youth, Professor PUN asks concretely what social values are, how they are perceived and exercised, and by whom. From students’ practices of care in schools, cooperation in the workplace, and solidarity in the community, she attempts to build a micro-foundation of social values that challenges and transgresses the logic of exchange value.
About the Speakers
PUN Ngai is Professor in the Department of Sociology, the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, University of London. She was honored as the winner of the C. Wright Mills Award for her first book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), which has been translated into French, German, Italian and Polish. Her next representative work, Dying for iPhone: Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2015) has also been translated into six languages. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in China: Post Socialist Transformation (2016, Polity Press), and author or co-author of hundreds of journal articles and conference papers.
Neeraj Kaushal is the moderator of this event. She is a Professor of Social Policy and Chair of the doctoral program at Columbia School of Social Work. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics (Bonn, Germany). Dr. Kaushal is the author of Blaming Immigrants: Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement (2018, Columbia University Press), in which she investigates the core causes of rising disaffection towards immigrants globally and tests common complaints against immigration.
