Event

The Q-AOS Brown Bag Seminar Series are held every Wednesday lunch time from April 2021. The purpose of this webinar series is to provide opportunities not only to learn research related with SDGs in Asian and Oceanian regions and but also to expand your research network in different academic areas. The webinar is free, available in English and Japanese, and open to everyone! We hope you all come and join us!

Recent years have witnessed heightened tensions around China’s territorial periphery - from Xinjiang in the Far West to Hong Kong in the Southeast. Unrest has both been provoked and further fuelled by intensifying efforts to assert central control, in a context of intensifying repression and surveillance across Chinese society. The targets of this repression encompass not only populations on the nation’s territorial borders, but also underprivileged and potentially restive constituencies in ‘Inner China’ (内地), such as migrant workers from the country’s rural hinterland. While issues such as Xinjiang’s ‘securitisation’, the vanishing of Hong Kong’s autonomy, intensifying tensions with Taiwan and the plight of the migrant underclass are each widely reported, they tend to be discussed and analysed in isolation from each other. Moreover, there is a dearth of comparative research into the role of education in explaining and legitimating Beijing’s policies domestically; disciplining and ‘re-educating’ recalcitrant communities on society’s margins; or widening the gulf in sentiment that separates the latter from those identifying more closely with the official narrative of Chineseness. This series therefore brings together some of the latest research into the politics of education in ‘peripheral China’. ‘Periphery’ is conceived here in primarily terms of territory, with reference to the intersecting dimensions of politics, ethnicity, religion, language and class / residency.