Doctoral Dissertation Research: Harmony Under Construction - State Law and Rural Labor in Building Urban China

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Harmony Under Construction - State Law and Rural Labor in Building Urban China The spectacular rise of China's modern cities is possible because of the strength and labor of a vast workforce from the countryside. This project explores how economic, legal, and social reforms in China have redefined urban labor, and how construction workers experience these changes in their daily lives. It engages questions about the relationship between law and society, and aims to discover novel ways that citizens are governed, how legal consciousness is developing, and how citizenship is transforming under a changing economic and political system. The study also complements a large body of research on gender that explores the work of migrant women, employed in large numbers in China's factories. Construction, an almost exclusively male industry, allows for a comparison of masculinity and male migrants' experience of urban work. Further, this study investigates the transnational role of American and European architecture firms in Chinese development, including the workplace relationships and modes of communication about design between foreign architects and local labor. The researcher works in conjunction with local scholars in Xian to better understand the daily lives of construction workers in China; a population that, to-date, has been largely invisible and under-represented in current research on Chinese development.