Hosted by the Humanities Center and faculty fellow, Xiqiao Wang. Respondents include Molly Warsh (History) & Dr. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (English, UMass Amherst). This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

This project builds on research efforts to explore left-behind women’s lived experiences with migration in three economically under-developed provinces (Hainan, Anhui, Guizhou) in China. Drawing from ethnographic data (semi-structured interview, participant-observation, literacy artifacts) and using mobile methods (Finlay & Bowman, 2017), I construct thick description of young women’s lived experiences with migration and literacy and explore participants’ experiential and affective relationship with knowledge of changing urban and rural places in situ.

For this colloquium, I examine how young women from the Hakka ethnic group, a historically migratory ethnic configuration, work with and against narratives, cultural rituals, literary and artistic forms, and aesthetic sensitivities historically evolving through migration. I pursue these questions: How are left-behind Hakka women’s social, geographic, and literacy mobility entangled in historical imaginary of prosperity and patterns of forced/voluntary migration? How do Hakka women mobilize such imaginaries along with their multilingual repertoires to perform and disrupt gender and national identities? I hope to share my emerging efforts to map situated accounts onto broader migration trajectories surfacing through triangulated reading of observational notes, digital photos, and GIS data.