School of Social and Political Science

Description

Part of the CRFR & Sociology Speaker Series

With Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China, Liu Jieyu offers a comprehensive examination of Chinese family life since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Grounding her account in the analysis of 260 life history narratives and rich ethnographic data, Liu traces the changing ways families have navigated such experiential milestones as childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and intimacy, and aging over the past seven decades. Using generation, the urban-rural divide, and gender as her analytical lenses, she provides an alternative narrative of Chinese family life, countering the dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.

This discussion will be chaired by Dr Jingyu Mao, University of Edinburgh.

Speaker Bio

Liu Jieyu is professor of sociology and China studies at SOAS University of London. She is the author of Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation and Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work and the joint editor-in-chief of The China Quarterly.