THOMAS FLAVEL: Cosmopolitan Culture among Urban Chinese Youth [ECR]

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Manchester China Institute

In this Early Career Researcher Workshop, Dr Thomas Flavel explores cosmopolitan culture and subculture among urban Chinese youth.

Young Chinese people have come of age with near-pervasive mobile broadband internet access and unprecedented exposure to global media. To explore the implications of these cosmopolitan communications, I employ a mix of ethnographic and computational methods in comparing two groups of young Chinese VPN-users – elite university students and subcultural bohemians – in an inland Chinese city. I argue against views of cultural globalization as either linear and unidirectional, or as chaotic, presenting the effects of cosmopolitanism in this cultural sense as diverse yet largely predictable at the local level. I show how global cultural engagement comprises a form of cultural capital among both groups, yet with highly divergent implications for social integration. Among the student group, engagement with global intellectual and high-cultural content, as well as international travel, reinforces their elite self-image and the taken-for-grantedness of dominant social hierarchies. Among the bohemians, the symbolic repertoires of global subcultures support a vibrant field of localized cultural production, generating prestige independently of socioeconomic background, while supporting oppositional stances towards the sociocultural mainstream. I further consider the potential influence of divergent Chinese cultural traditions on these groups, and whether arguments for the diversity of such traditions nonetheless remain indefensibly essentialist.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERDr Thomas Flavel is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, based in Politics and the Cathie Marsh Institute. His current research is focused on threats to representative democracy from the use of digital media. He has recently graduated with a DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. His DPhil thesis explored the impact of cosmopolitanism and border-level internet censorship evasion on the social organization, culture, and politics of Chinese youth.

NotesMCI’s ECR Workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the <a href="https://www.mci.manchester.ac.uk/" title="https://www.mci.manchester.ac.uk/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Manchester China Institute</a>. They seek to bring together students, faculty, and staff who can best provide feedback as Early Career Researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

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THOMAS FLAVEL: Cosmopolitan Culture among Urban Chinese Youth [ECR]

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THOMAS FLAVEL: Cosmopolitan Culture among Urban Chinese Youth [ECR]

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Leftover Men and Women: The Politics of Reproducing Patriarchal Norms

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