The children of China's great migration

Professor Rachel Murphy, Professor of Chinese Development and Society and fellow of St Antony's College, University of Oxford, President of the British Association of Chinese Studies and former junior research fellow at Jesus College, will deliver a talk on her recently published book, The Children of China's Great Migration, Cambridge University Press (2020). The lecture will be followed by a question and answer session.

In China in 2018 over 200 million rural migrants worked away from their home villages, fuelling the country’s rapid economic boom. In the 2010s over sixty-one million rural children had at least one parent who had migrated without them, while nearly half had been left behind by both parents. Professor Murphy will draw on her longitudinal fieldwork in two landlocked provinces - Anhui and Jiangxi - to explore the experiences of these left-behind children and to examine the impact of this great migration on childhood in China and on family relationships. She will provide a multi-faceted insight into experiences of parental migration, study pressures, poverty, institutional discrimination, patrilineal family culture, and reconfigured gendered and intergenerational relationships.

Professor Rachel Murphy is Professor of Chinese Development and Society and a fellow of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. She is course director for the MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies and the MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at University of Oxford. She studied for her doctorate in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge, supported by a Trinity College external studentship and a Senior Rouse Ball scholarship. She then held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Development Studies at Cambridge and from 2000-2003 was a junior research fellow at Jesus College Cambridge. Later, she taught in East Asian Studies and Social Policy at the University of Bristol before moving to Oxford in 2007. She has also held adjunct and visiting positions at Hong Kong University and the University of Western Australia.

Professor Murphy is President of the British Association of Chinese Studies (BACS).

This is one of the lectures in the on-going China Centre Seminar series, hosted by the China Centre, Jesus College. The lectures, given by eminent speakers, will cover a broad range of topics and disciplines.

Booking

This is a virtual seminar. Attendance is free. Advance booking is required by emailing: china-centre@jesus.cam.ac.uk.  Limited places are available and priority will be given to members of Jesus College and the University of Cambridge.