Abstract
This chapter takes up the Chinese “floating children” (or internal migrant children) as both a method and a site to problematize how social science research represents difference, mobility, and change based upon unity, fixity, and stability. I begin with providing a general account of diverse theories and narratives in use by Chinese scholarship, which represents the “floating children” as a distinct type of people. Then, I attempt to unravel the implicit presumptions and consequences of those representations and briefly introduce “performativity” as an approach to denaturalize and de-essentialize those recurring notions and narratives on migrants and their education, such as “rural-urban dichotomy,” “individual adaptability,” “social integration,” “socioeconomic status,” and “suzhi” (human quality). In the third section, I approach each of those taken-for-granted notions as historically produced, enacted, and retrofitted in the post-Mao China. I am considering these notions’ troubled entanglements as systems of reason that organize practices and make possible the “floating children” as both the “subject” and “object” of government. To conclude, I emphasize the paradox of the systems of reason, embodied and enacted by the discourses surrounding the education of “floating children,” and propose considering migrants and migration as an alternative method toward rethinking mobility and difference.
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I would like to thank Prof. Thomas Popkewitz, Prof. Robert Kaiser, Christopher Kirchgasler, and Viktoria Boretska for their generosity of providing insightful discussions, comments, and suggestions during my writing of this manuscript.
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Zheng, L. (2018). Migration as a Method: Deterritorializing the “Floating Children” in Contemporary China. In: Hultqvist, E., Lindblad, S., Popkewitz, T. (eds) Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance. Educational Governance Research, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61971-2_16
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