Dr Terry Woronov

Research areas

My research focuses on social transformation in contemporary China. As an urban anthropologist, I am particularly interested in how China’s rapidly-changing cities produce new opportunities for – and new constraints and limitations on – the nation’s children and youth.

My dissertation research looked at a large-scale social engineering project in China called “suzhi jiaoyu” (education for quality.) Based on two years of fieldwork in elementary schools in Beijing, this work looked at the ideology of “quality” children, and efforts by the state, parents, schools, and the media to raise children’s “quality” by transforming their everyday lives. I have published articles about suzhi jioayu and ideologies of “quality” in journals including Anthropological Quarterly, positions, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Ethnography.

My current research, funded by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the U.S. National Academy of Education, looks at the lives and experiences of slightly older youth. A research team from Hohai University in Nanjing and I spent a year studying vocational education in Nanjing in order to understand working-class youth culture in China. I am currently working on a book manuscript that explores the question of class transformation in China’s post-socialist, post-industrial cities, and how gender and generation inflect class consciousness and class transformations.

My research interests include nationalism and the anthropology of the state; gender; youth culture; the politics of children and childhood; globalization, and urban theory.

Recent Publications

• “Doing Time: Mimetic Labour and Vocational Education in China,” South Atlantic Quarterly, forthcoming, 111:4 (Autumn, 2012). SPECIAL ISSUE, CO-EDITED WITH MELINDA COOPER
• Precarious Youth, Class Consciousness: Class Formation and Class Consciousness in Nanjing Vocational Secondary Schools, The Journal of Contemporary China, forthcoming, 21(77) September, 2012.
• “Learning to Serve: Urban Youth, Vocational Schools and New Class Formations in China,” The China Journal 66: 77-99, July, 2011.
• <<治理中儿童>> (Governing China’s Youth), 中国研究 (Journal of China Studies), 11-12, pp. 208-229, Winter, 2010.
• “Governing China’s Children: Governmentality and ‘Education for Quality,’” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 17(3), Winter, 2009.
• “Youthful Concerns: Movement, Belonging and Modernity,” second author with Jennifer Roth-Gordon. Pragmatics: Journal of Language Studies, 19(1), March, 2009.