Yige Dong, “The Politics of Social Reproduction in China under State Socialism”
November 21 @ 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
The Asian History Working Group is excited to welcome Prof. Yige Dong, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Gender & Sexuality Studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY, to campus to speak on her research about twentieth century China.
The Politics of Social Reproduction in China under State Socialism
Based on archival and oral history research, this talk unpacks the Chinese Communist Party’s rhetoric about “collectivizing care” and explains how this radical approach to doing care was being unfolded on the ground in the first decade of the People’s Republic (1949-1962). By showing both differences and striking commonalities between the capitalist and socialist system of doing care, this talk sheds light on a new vision about care work that goes beyond the Cold-War paradigm yet without losing careful scrutiny of both the roles of the authoritarian state and capital in transforming gendered social life.
Prof. Yige Dong is an Assistant Professor who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and Criminology and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Holding a PhD in Sociology, Yige is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests include labor, gender, work, political economy, contentious politics, and comparative-historical methods.
Yige is currently working on her first monograph, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the century-long transformation of care work among the Chinese working-class. In addition, Yige’s articles have appeared in International Review of Social History, Critical Sociology, Critical Asian Studies, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, among others.
Yige’s research has received several awards from academic organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Sociological Association; and some of her works have been translated into Italian, Hungarian, and Portuguese.
