Department seminar: Ole Johannes Kaland

Seminar paper

Central to the Chinese discourse on national progress and development is the aim of restoring China to its former glory as a great civilization. A prevailing notion of the discourse is that a strong nation needs a strong population. Since the 1980’s, government campaigns have aimed to change the so-called quantity/quality ratio of the population through child limitation policies, self-cultivation and education. According to the discourse, while economic reforms combined with the cheap labor of the country’s rural workforce has led to tremendous economic growth so far, continued progress necessitates ‘high-quality citizens’.

This entails a highly educated population, one that is not only capable of producing increasingly demanding stuff, but is able to innovate in order to compete on the global arena. Underpinning this logic is the concept of ‘suzhi’ (loosely translated into English as ‘quality’), which acts as a floating signifier. While few are able to define the concept, most people will have an opinion about who has and does not have ‘quality'. Typically, rural people and migrant workers are seen to lack ‘quality’ due to low educational levels, and have been denigrated for holding back the country’s development because of it. Paradoxically, while China’s 287 million migrant workers have been instrumental for Chinese economic growth, they are not offered local welfare rights, including their children’s rights to attend local public schools.

Based on 16 months of fieldwork in Shanghai between 2010-2012, Ole Johannes will present his ongoing research on education, internal migrant youths and aspirations in China. The presentation will begin with an overview of how Chinese education is currently governed, including the recent educational paradigm of ‘suzhi jiaoyu’ (education for quality). Ole Johannes will discuss what it entails for migrant youths not only to have limited access to public education, but limited access to forms of education that are supposed to cultivate the very ‘quality’ that they are seen to lack. Ole Johannes will argue for a performative understanding of how education is used to reflect social status in contemporary China, including how migrant youths resist and negotiate the discourse. 

About the lecturer

Ole Johannes Kaland is a social anthropologist with a particular fascination for issues relating to sociocultural hierarchies, mobility, youth, learning and education, migration and China. He graduated with a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex (2014), and has taught intercultural studies at NLA University College since then. This year, he is a visiting researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the seminar. All interested are welcome!