The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to this week's seminar with Dr Beth E. Notar from Trinity College, CT:
"'My Father is Li Gang!': Transgressive Mobility and Playful Corruption in Contemporary Urban China"
Abstract:
Conceptually, scholars have often linked mobility with freedom and with resistance to state power (e.g., Cresswell 1996, 2006). If the state is interested in control, in order and in discipline, then mobility has been described as a positive form of transgression against the state, against control, and against stasis. But what happens when transgressive mobility is done not by subalterns, not by the oppressed, but by those in power, or by those related to power through kinship connections, or by those who aspire to power? This paper examines three "sites" of transgressive mobility in contemporary urban China -- street crossing, hit-and-run accidents, and drag racing - to ask how we might reconceptualize the relationship between mobility and power.
Refreshments and further discussions in the department lunch room after the seminar.
All welcome!
Best regards,
BSAS Committee