PhD | Imagining the Rural in Contemporary China from a Perspective of Cultural Biographies of Everyday Objects.

PhD-Candidate: Chen Zhou | ASCA, University of Amsterdam | Supervisors: Esther Peeren, Jeroen de Kloet

Chinese society has been witnessing a ‘rural lifestyle’ in the urban, during the past decade, which incorporates rural elements in the production, consumption and possession of everyday objects. By tracing the biographies of those rural-embedded objects, from production, consumption to possession, this project aims to explore how ‘rural imaginations’ are constructed, examining the way the rural becomes mobilized to influence urban experience and the way urban mobilizations of the rural reflect back on the rural and perpetuate certain imaginations of the rural, while obfuscating aspects of the rural that do not fit into these imaginations.