Global Studies and Modern Languages China Scholar Job Market Talks
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
2:30 PM-4:00 PM
You are invited to the Global Studies and Modern Languages China Scholar Job Market Talks on January 24 and 25, and February 1.
Spectacular Technology, Invisible Harms: Touring Guangzhou’s Waste Facilities
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
2:30 to 4 p.m.
Hagerty Library
Room L33
Amy Zhang, PhD, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
Summary: This talk examines organized public tours of waste to energy (WTE) incinerators in Guangzhou, China against the backdrop of mounting public concerns about the toxicity of the urban environment. Visits to WTE incinerators invite urban residents to evaluate the safety of burning waste. Through ethnographies of waste facility tours, I examine moments of tension and debate around the dematerialization of waste, where messy material effluence is transformed into invisible toxins that ultimately accrue in bodies. Increasingly undetectable to the senses, the evidence of pollution and harm from waste treatment facilities are knowable only through figures and statistics. I argue that visitors hesitate to subscribe to the capacity of instruments to alert them to the dangers of burning waste. Instead, they rely on their own body’s ability to sense harm.
When Things Don’t Go as Planned: Contingencies and Parental Involvement for Elite University Admission in China
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
2:30 to 4 p.m.
Hagerty Library
Harry Stern Judaic Studies Seminar Room (3rd floor)
Yi-Lin Chiang, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Summary: Studies often assume that parents are regularly involved in children's education. This study instead shows that elite parents are involved in children’s schooling only when elite university admission and hence status reproduction is at risk. Drawing on ethnography and interviews with elite students and parents in Beijing, I argue that elite parents’ strategic involvement against educational contingencies is a key aspect that contributes to inequality.
Reform Through Leadership in China’s State-Owned Economy
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
2 to 3:30 p.m.
Hagerty Library
Harry Stern Judaic Studies Seminar Room (3rd floor)
Wendy Leutert, Department of Government, Cornell University
Summary: What explains variation in economic reform outcomes in China’s state-owned economy? I argue that organizational leaders exercise bounded autonomy to influence reform using two methods: by formulating specific strategies to achieve broad central objectives; and by altering organizational structure. Using a most-similar case study design to analyze board chairmanships in a Chinese central state-owned enterprise, I identify organizational leaders’ impact on reform outcomes at the company level: global expansion strategy, interactions among intra-firm entities, and conceptualization of firm-market relations. I then extend analysis of this relationship to an original, large-n database of all Chinese central state-owned enterprises between 2003 and 2016. I assess leaders’ impact on economic reform outcomes across these firms, measured through mergers and corporate governance development. This project highlights how organizational leaders’ choices and actions drive the co-evolution of organizations (state-owned enterprises) and institutions (state ownership) in China’s economic reform.
Please make sure to bring your Dragon card or ID for admittance into Hagerty Library.
For more information, please contact Jessica Kratzer at jkk55@drexel.edu.
Co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages.
Contact Information
Jacqueline Rios
215.895.6910
jsr62@drexel.edu