Education
- PhD Anthropology (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007)
- MA Culture Research (Tel Aviv University, 2001)
- BA East Asian Studies (Hebrew University, 1998)
About Me
Associate Professor & Abraham Miller Chair in Chinese Studies at the Department of Asian Studies; Vice Dean for International Affairs of the Faculty of Humanities; Research Fellow at the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Straddling the disciplines of China Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology, my work covers a range of topics relating to children, youth and education in China, including: the globalization of Chinese education; the interplay between changes in notions and practices of childrearing and education and the emergence of new conceptualizations of play, privacy and subjectivity in China; the rise of child psychology in contemporary urban China; and the development of a new Chinese discourse on children's rights and children's citizenship, a topic which was the focus of my first book, Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
My second book, Children in China (2016, China Today series, Polity Press), provides an overview of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the lives of rural and urban Chinese children since the launch of economic reforms in 1978. Covering schooling, consumption, identity formation processes, family and peer relations among other aspects of children’s lives, the book explores the rise of new ideas of child-care, child-vulnerability and child-agency; the impact of the One-Child Policy; and the emergence of children as independent consumers in the new market economy. It also demonstrates how economic restructuring and the recent waves of rural–urban migration have produced starkly unequal conditions for children’s education and welfare both in the countryside and in the cities.
My new book, Mobilizing China's One-Child Generation: Education, Nationalism, and Youth Militarization in the PRC (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) considers the militarization of youth and their education in 20th- and 21st century China, with a particular focus on the Xi Jinping era (2012-). Drawing on government, news media, popular media, and educational sources, and on data from two ethnographic field projects conducted in China in 2012-2019, the book explores the promotion of military values and techniques in PRC media and education, highlights the intersection between this trend and the construction of national collectivity, masculinities and femininities in modern and contemporary China, and discusses Chinese youth current notions of war and the military.