Seminar Series: Abstract

3.00pm
November 24 2009
PSC Reading Room, 4.27 Hedley Bull building

Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China
Dr Andrew Kipnis

This talk, based on a forthcoming book, examines educational desire in China in the broadest possible political and cultural framework. The consequences of this desire are vast — influencing household and national economic priorities, birth rates, ethnic relations, aesthetic judgments and patterns of governance—and its causes complex. Just where does this desire come from? What are the specific cultural, economic, political and social circumstances that frame its emergence?

Andrew Kipnis was awarded an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change and Department of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU.

Dr Kipnis’s recent work centres on education reform as a lens onto broad processes of governing and social and cultural change in China. He currently is involved in an ARC-funded comparative study of urban citizenship in different types of rapidly urbanizing areas in China. He is the author of China and Postsocialist Anthropology: Theorizing Power and Society after Communism (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge Books, 2008), and Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self and Subculture in a North China Village (Duke University Press, Durham, 1997). His recent journal articles include “Audit Cultures: Neoliberal governmentality, socialist legacy or technologies of governing?”, American Ethnologist (2008); “Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the PRC” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2007); “Suzhi: a Keyword Approach”, China Quarterly (2006); and “The disturbing educational discipline of peasants”, The China Journal (2001). Dr Kipnis is Co-Editor of The China Journal.