The Monday Lecture Series: Taiwan Literature and Culture in Focus
Zoom ID: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/66676242329

Chinese Migration, Emotion, and Digital Entrepreneurship: Case Study of Chinese Migrant Women in China and Taiwan
 

This research-informed lecture draws on my multi-sited ethnographic work in China and Taiwan, including over one hundred interviews, and explores the mobilities of Chinese women's who move from the countryside to the city in China and who re-migrate to Taiwan through marriage. Together, we will look at the ways Chinese migrant women in Taiwan cope with a condition of social, economic and familial vulnerability, by developing online gendered social networks and practices of digital entrepreneurship through the social media platform WeChat. We will investigate the functioning of digital entrepreneurship, the ways it is performed, the commodities commercialised, and the commercial circuits identified by women across the Taiwan Strait. We will discuss how borders and trading restrictions are contested and transgressed though e-commerce. Broadly, in this lecture we will investigate how, in the digital age of migration, Chinese migratory paths are complexifying and are growingly characterised by a use of digital platforms by the ‘connected’ migrants. Looking at the e-entrepreneurship produced by Chinese women in Taiwan, we will delve into the new digital, emotional and commercial geographies of interconnection between China and Taiwan.

Dr Beatrice Zani is a sociologist, postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University, Department of East-Asian studies. She is research associate at the European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT, Tuebingen University), and at TRIANGLE (ENS Lyon, France). She is also executive board member of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS).  Her research explores Chinese women’s multiple mobilities between China and Taiwan, and the link between migration, emotion and ICT in the making of globalisation. Her work has been recently awarded: the Mobility Prize by the Forum Mobile Lives; the Lyon 2 University Dissertation Award, and the Young Author Award by the journal Sociology of Work. She has recently published a new book (2021): Women Migrants in Southern China and in Taiwan. Mobilities, digital economies and emotions (Routledge).

The Monday Lecture Series: Taiwan Literature and Culture in Focus is curated by Prof. Irmy Schweiger, Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies.
This lecture series has been made possible with the generous funding provided by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan and the kind support from Taipei Mission, Stockholm.