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Passing Through Shanghai
Ethnographic Insights into the Mobile Lives of Expatriate Youths
Passing Through Shanghai examines how children experience international mobility. Focusing on a specific yet diverse group of expatriate youths in contemporary Shanghai, the book investigates how children negotiate cultural identity when they are subject to the highly mobile and often privileged lifestyle associated with their parent’s international careers. The ethnographic fieldwork that informs the book was carried out in Shanghai from 2010 to 2012 and focused on expatriate teenagers’ everyday practices, their lives at international schools, their engagement with the city, their dreams and aspirations, as well as their questions of belonging. The book’s ethnographic approach captures the “in-between” state of moving while growing up and explores teenage practices and positionings in this transitory situation. The teenagers’ own perspectives and experiences of living in expatriate communities contribute to a larger view of the interdependence and contradictions between the aspired flexibility of twenty-first century identities and the rigidity of cultural divisions based on nationality, ethnicity, gender, and class.
Media coverage
Interview with Marie Sander on DRadio Wissen 14/04/2014
"The book makes a clear contribution to existing gaps in knowledge about the mobile lives of children of expatriates, including that of cross-cultural identity negotiations, emotional and affective lives, and the work of managing ‘dwelling’ and ‘moving’ at the same time. Scholars, educators, and students will find this to be a useful case study offering rich materials that connect to critical questions around young people’s temporary sojourns and migrant youth cultures."
Yi’En Cheng (2018), in: Children's Geographies 16:2, 220-221
