Session Information
Contribution
Contemporary meaning of being Chinese, as any other social identities, is constantly being produced and reproduced (Hall, 1992). The Uygur in Xinjiang region of China are officially defined as “Chinese” by the state, the mainstream society, as well as by many Uygur themselves. Understandings of the ways in which Uygur young people perceive their own identities are closely related to understandings of how the meaning of contemporary “Chinese” is produced and understood. As part of a larger project that intends to explore intercultural experiences involving contemporary Chinese and Uygur, the study is highly relevant to an European context. Given the increasing presence of different racial/ethnic groups in most European countries such as Germany and France, intercultural education among a diverse domestic population has become a pressing theoretic and practical issue in these societies.
Situated within existing discussion on the complicated identity issues concerning the major ethnic minority groups in China (费孝通, 1989; 王嘉毅,常宝宁,丁克贤,2008; 莫红梅,2010; 褚琼,徐黎丽,2010; 汪晖,2008;马戎,2004), the study intends to examine the formation of ethnic and national identities of ethnic students in rural Uygur regions, while situating it within current local educational contexts, which is notably characterized by a bilingual teaching approach. The research question can be broken down into several interrelated sub-questions:
1. How local ethnic students, parents, and teachers perceive the ethnic and national identity (and/or citizenship) of the young generation?
2. How such perceptions about the multiple level identities of the local students could be contexualized in the recent bilingual education policy? How language issue is posited in the identity creation of the local ethnic minorities.
3. How such perceptions of ethnic and national identities are further related to historical conditions and local and global structural factors, in particularly the transformation of regional and national economy, and the increasing movements of resources and people both domestically and globally?
Here I would like to borrow Bourdieu’s (1984; 1990) theory on classification, representation, and symbolic power and struggle, which could be highly relevant to the identity politics in question. According to Bourdieu (1990), the perception of the social world by agents or social institutions is the product of a “double structuring” at both objective and subjective levels. In other words, it is socially structured because both the properties attributed to agents or institutions and their models of perception and evaluation are socially determined (Bourdieu, 1990: 133). Therefore the symbolic struggles over the perception of the social world may take two different forms: on the objective level one may take action in the form of individual or collective representation, especially those help to manipulate the image of individual or group’s position in social space; on the subjective level, one may act to try to change “the cognitive and evaluative structures”, that is, “essentially, the words, the names which construct social reality” (Bourdieu, 1990: 134). And “the most typical of these strategies of construction are those which aim at reconstructing retrospectively a past adjusted to the needs of the present. … Symbolic power, in this sense, is a power of ‘worldmaking’” (Bourdieu, 1990: 137).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1990. In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Dillabough, J., E. Wang, and J. Kennelly. 2005. ‘Ginas,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘gangstas’: Young people’s struggles to ‘become somebody’ in working-class urban Canada. Journal of CurriculumTheorizing 21, 2: 83–108. Kennelly, J. and J. Dillagough. 2008. Young people mobilizing the language of citizenship: struggles for classification and new meaning in an uncertain world. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 29, 5: 493-508. Hall, S. (1992). The question of cultural identity. In S. Hall, D. Held & T. McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and Its Futures (pp. 273-316). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press in Association with the Open University. 费孝通,中华民族的多元一体格局,北京大学学报(哲学社会科学版),1989,4: 1-19. 汪晖,东方主义、民族区域自治与尊严政治:关于“西藏问题”的一点思考,天涯,2008:173-191. 马戎,2004,理解民族关系的新思路:少数族群问题的“去政治化”,北京大学学报(哲学社会科学版),41,6: 122-133. 王嘉毅,常宝宁,丁克贤,新疆南疆维吾尔族青少年国家认同调查,新疆社会科学, 2008, 4: 40-45. 莫红梅,多民族国家视域下的公民身份与国家认同,教学与研究,2010,9: 37-43. 褚琼,徐黎丽,多民族认同的变量分析,以青海河南蒙古自治县多民族社区为例,西安社会科学,2010, 28,3: 37-40.
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