Willy Sier, Dream Chasers: Becoming Urban in the New China

Pour la première séance du cycle de séminaires « Anthropologies d’Ailleurs », nous avons le plaisir d’accueillir Willy Sier, anthropologue à l’Université d’Utrecht, en visite à l’IFRAE en février et mars 2023.

 Dream Chasers: Becoming Urban in the New China
Willy Sier
(Intervention en anglais)

Mardi 7 février 2023, 17h-19h
Salle LO.04
Maison de la Recherche, 2 rue de Lille, Paris

In the first part of this talk, I will talk about my book project Dreams Chasers. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2015-2016, and 2017) in Wuhan and rural villages and towns in China’s Hubei province, this book tells the stories of the millions of young, Chinese people from rural backgrounds who try to carve out a space for themselves in China’s urban society by becoming the first person in their families to enroll in university. It shows how a new mobility pattern that brings young people from the countryside to Chinese cities as students, not as workers, has taken hold of Chinese society and analyzes how China’s educational expansion drives the renegotiation of rural-urban relations in Chinese cities. In the second part of this talk, I will introduce the collaborative film making and photography projects I conducted during the time of the COVID-lockdowns in China and show one of the short documentaries made in this period.

Willy Sier is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She works on questions of mobility and identity, rural-urban relations, gender, and education, and enjoys producing both written and visual output. Willy first moved to Beijing when she was 18-years old to study Mandarin and has since then been very interested in the country, first as a language student, later as an anthropologist.

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