Harriet Evans, Professor Emerita at the University of Westminster and Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science – LSE, will give an Open Lecture on “The Challenge of Change – Expectations of Gender in Urban Disadvantaged Neighbourhood of Central Beijing”.
The session will be held in English and is exclusively in-person. Admission is free (limited to the seating capacity of the DCV Auditorium).
Alongside this Open Lecture, Harriet Evans will also be coordinating the training session “Urban Intersections: Interrogating Meanings of Urban Change”. Find out more here.
These events are organised by CIAS — Centre for research in Anthropology and Health (“Technoscience, Society and Environment” research group) and CEIS20, with support from the UC Department of Life Sciences and the Sci-Tech Asia International Research Network.
This initiative is part of the CEIS20 Axes of Interdisciplinary Knowledge.
For more information, please contact doutoramentoantropologia@uc.pt.
This talk reflects on how we might imagine the notion of change taking shape through the relationship between urban and gender transformation. My discussion focuses on Dashalar, the deprived inner city neighbourhood of Beijing that constitutes the spatial and social site of my study of urban change at the margins, in Beijing from Below. Rather than imagine urban transformation as a series of modes of governance and quantifiable plans and practices enacted on an urban population, whether supportive or resistant, I argue, following Doreen Massey, that the physical processes of transformation of space and place are in themselves social and cultural and therefore gendered processes. I develop this argument with particular attention to the gendered positioning of both women and men in Dashalar. Throughout I reflect on the significance of this ethnographically based ‘micro-study’ for the big questions of historical progress and change, continuity and rupture.