On Jan 17, 2025 the  ChinaWhite project successfully hosted an International workshop, “ Coupling across Boundaries: Race, Migration and Chinese/Foreign Relationships.” This workshop is organized by Shanshan Lan, Willy Sier and Elena Barabantseva. The location is Uva anthropology common room REC B 5.12.

Schedule

9.30-10.30 Walk in, Coffee, introduction

10.30-12.30 Chair: Willy Sier

Panel one: Reframing Chinese/foreign relations in the context of China’s economic rise

Investors and Return Migrants: How China’s Economic Rise is Transforming Cross-Border Marriages and Migration Patterns (Monica Liu, University of St. Thomas)

Leveraging Westernized Chinese Masculinities in Hong Kong’s Transnational Dating Fields (Gabriella Angelini, Chinese University of Hong Kong)

“She is a good wife as long as she is not in China.”: Return migration and changing gender dynamics among Chinese/white couples in China (Shanshan Lan, University of Amsterdam)

International marriage, sovereignty, and racial capitalism in globalising China (Elena Barabantseva, University of Manchester)

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.00 Chair: Shanshan Lan

Panel two: Negotiating intersectional power relations in cross-border intimacies

“Our Remarkable Marriage”: Race and Borders in Marriages between African asylum-seekers and Hong Kong women (Sealing Cheng, Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Boundary bricoleurs: the management of variegated differences among Sino-Congolese couples residing in Congo (DRC) (Cai Chen, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium).

Love Across the Divide: Chinese-Taiwanese Couples Studying in Europe (Yu-chin Tseng, University of Tübingen, Germany)

3.00- 3.30pm Coffee/Tea Break

3.30-5.00pm: Chair: Elena Barabantseva

Panel three: New trends in cross-boundary queer relations

Racialized Queer Desires: Reconfiguring Homomasculinities in Globalizing China (Benson Zhou, NYU Shanghai)

Western dreams in crisis? Rise of inter-Asian gay orientations (Hazuki Kaneko, Hong Kong University)

Christina Kefala published an online article on SAPIENS with title: "Can “Made in China” Become a Beacon of Sustainability? on June 11, 2024. 

Christina Kefala gave an interview and was quoted in The Australian Broadcasting Corporation website about the foreign entrepreneurs and businesses in China during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-30/china-expat-exodus-covid-19-pandemic-lockdowns-tensions-economy/101584906?fbclid=IwAR2JECJfdfWT0pTganwklXFWlhwSoupar5SI3vZcKYja_3VrUr5wORYJuno

Christina Kefala published an online article on the American Ethnologists website titled "An Ethnographic Encounter With "White" AI" on November 26, 2022.
 

https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/essays/an-ethnographic-encounter-with-white-ai-christina-kefala/

Dr. Shanshan Lan participated in a  roundtable discussion as a panelist in a Late-Breaking virtual session for the 2022 AAA Annual Meeting, Unsettling Landscapes on November 9 2022. The title of her presentation is: The transnational circulation of whiteness in China’s ELT industry.

Researching Whiteness in a Transnational Pandemic Context

Organisers: the ChinaWhite research team (www.china-white.org), Department of Anthropology/AISSR, University of Amsterdam

Location: REC B 5.12

With the rise of Asian economies, more and more white westerners are moving to Asia to look for business and job opportunities. The outbreak of Covid-19 in China in early 2020 and its development into a global pandemic not only posed challenges to transnational mobility for various groups of migrants, but significantly restricted onsite research activities. It pushes us to ask new questions addressing the intersection of race, class, gender, nationality, language, and other demarcations of social inequalities, which have been both highlighted and contested by the global spread of Covid-19.

The ChinaWhite phds have compiled an online bibliography, which includes entries such as "race in English language teaching," "race in visual cultures," and "race in business and entrepreneurship." It also contains hyperlinks to useful online resources regarding the theme of race, migration and mobility. Please click HERE to access the bibliography.

Dr. Shanshan Lan had an interview with Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities on her two recent publications: one about rural-origin Chinese students in South Korea, the other on privileges and precariousness among white English teachers in China. Listen to the podcast by clicking here.

Christina Kefala wrote a magazine article for Sixth Tone on January 20, 2021. The article is about young Chinese consumers and why they prefer to consume Chinese fashion items and products from local businesses and brands instead of western ones. 

Raviv Litman wrote a magazine article for Sixth Tone on August 26, 2021. The article is about the Filipino teachers who were experiencing a higher degree of job insecurity because of new education technology regulations in China.