Events

This is a joint seminar between the Asia Research Institute’s Changing Family in Asia Cluster and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Family, Children and Youth Cluster, National University of Singapore

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Jean Yeung, Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Over the past three decades, a distinctly post-socialist institution of marriage has emerged in China as a result of economic changes such as re-privatization and the individualization of property rights. However, these developments are also accompanied by broader cultural shifts; sexual intimacy is no longer conflated with marriage, and legislative and judicial interventions have tilted to increasingly favor claims of individuals over those of the conjugal unit. Professor Davis’s lecture traces the development of this phenomenon by examining the economic and legal foundations for marriages, and how the Supreme People’s Court started interpreting these foundations differently after 2001.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Deborah Davis is Professor of Sociology at Yale University, where and her primary teaching interests are inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. In addition to teaching at Yale, she has co-ordinated ten summer fieldwork workshops with colleagues of The Chinese University of Hong Kong where Yale students work collaboratively with students from Hong Kong and China. Davis is currently a member of the National Committee on US China Relations, Associate Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, The China Review and the China Journal of Social Work. In 2004 she helped launch the Yale China Health Journal. Past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification and occupational mobility. In 2009 Stanford University Press published Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China, co-edited with Wang Feng. Forthcoming with Stanford is a volume entitled Wives, Husbands and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China, co-edited with Sara Friedman. Currently she is completing a monograph entitled A Home of Their Own, a Study of the Social Consequences of the Privatization on the Institution of Marriage in Shanghai.


REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Mr Jonathan Lee at Email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg