Ralph Litzinger on China: Tying Research to Service
In the three years since its establishment at the university, DukeEngage, the volunteer service program for undergraduates, has proven highly appealing among students, attracting more than 1500 applications since its full launch year in 07-08. More than 800 students have participated in service around the world since DukeEngage began.
Increasingly, DukeEngage is also attracting faculty into its program leaders ranks, whether inspired by a connection to one’s research, an opportunity to work more collaboratively with students, or a chance to enhance one’s teaching back at Duke.
Ralph Litzinger, associate professor of cultural anthropology, has written extensively on ethnic minority politics, nationalism and the state in China. Since the Summer of 2008, and in collaboration with J.P. Morgan, Litzinger has led the DukeEngage in Beijing program which places student volunteers at the Dandelion Middle School (Pugongying Zhongxue), located in Daxing District in Beijing to work with children of migrant workers—rural residents who have moved to China’s largest cities in the last 20 years. Often underpaid, with no health or employment benefits, and subjected to a range of discriminatory practices, China’s migrant workers have built the new global cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, among other places, and increasingly provide service labor to China’s emerging urban middle class. The children of these migrant workers are at the center of the DukeEngage program’s work. Because migrant families lack the residential permit that grants access to the state education system, as well as the financial resources necessary to pay the steep tuition of private schools, more and more migrant youth now attend the “unofficial” schools that have sprung up in the last 10 years through the extraordinary efforts of Chinese and international education and social activists.
Below, Professor Litzinger responds to questions about the evolution of his DukeEngage program in Beijing and how it has emboldened his academic research.
1. In what way does The DukeEngage in Beijing program you lead connect to your ongoing research?
For the last 20 years, my research in China has almost consistently focused on questions of power, inequality, and social and economic forms of discrimination and marginalization. The first phase of my career explored these issues in the context of state policies of development and modernization in regions of China inhabited predominantly by ethnic minorities. The second phase of my research and publishing career has focused on issues of economic change and environmental and ecological justice on the Tibetan plateau, particularly in the Himalayan regions of northwest Yunnan Province. The third phase of my career is returning me to Beijing, where my studies in China began as a graduate student in the early 1990s. The Dandelion Middle School, the site of our Duke Engage Beijing project, has enabled a long term research project on migrant workers, and in particular on the families and children who began to come to Beijing in the late 1990s from all over rural China to build and service the astonishing local city that we see today. But this is not just a project about labor, and education, and migrant kids. It is also about globalization and its relationship to the Chinese government, as it eagerly attempts to address the astonishing degrees of economic disparity that today characterize China. Through our partnership and collaboration with a number of different non-governmental organizations and corporate social responsibility projects, I have been able to begin to map the complex ways in which both Chinese and international capital is pushing particular kinds of development and attempting to work with different sectors of Chinese society and government to address the many social and economic problems in China today. The migrant labor issue is obviously one of the largest and one of the most politically charged, in large part because it is always about issues of power, inequality and marginalization—the core focus of my research agenda in China.
2. Given the other demands you face as an engaged member of the faculty, how do your responsibilities related to DukeEngage fit into a very busy schedule, and why do you feel it's an important element of your professional experience?
For me, as with many of my colleagues, the Duke Engage Beijing project is a massive amount of work, in large part because of the amount of time, energy and labor it takes to set up and maintain this kind of project in China. I do this because of my commitment to make this kind of pedagogical project part of a larger process of reflecting on issues of advocacy, activism, and politics of intervention, historically and in our present moment. At the same time, I am in a constant battle to convince many of my colleagues at Duke that this kind of pedagogy is not divorced from larger theoretical debates—about power, knowledge, capitalism, globalization, the nature of oppression, the possibilities for resistance that are so much at the center of discussion in the social sciences and humanities at Duke. Admittedly, it is sometimes a hard sell.
3. Your particular DukeEngage program has proven to be one of the most successful and is being offered again in 2010. How would you characterize the success of the program thus far and what are you planning to do differently—if anything—in 2010?
One way to measure “success” is the enormous interest our project generates each year among Duke students—over the first two years we have had about 60 applicants a year for six spots each summer. But for me a better measure of success is that all 12 students who have volunteered at the school and in Beijing over the last two summers have come away from the program feeling like they have had to personally and collectively struggle to finds ways to work productively with the staff, teachers, and students at the school. If struggle and small measure of accomplishment occur each summer, then we are experiencing some kind of success. For me, working at the school is not supposed to be easy; nor is something called “engagement” always guaranteed. We have all had to work hard to adjust to living in an area of the city that sees few if any foreign tourists and has none of the usual amenities found in the more ritzy and international sections of the Beijing. We’ve had to learn to follow the everyday schedule of the school, which is highly structured and organized and disciplinarily rigorous. And we’ve had to learn to first listen to what the school needs, and then figure how to act in a meaningful and effectively away. That our students over the last two summers have been able to meet these challenges, and come up with projects that the school, and the staff and the students greatly appreciated, is what has made our program a “success.” For the school, success is measured differently. It is measured in terms of how many kids it can keep in school, and how well those who remain in school do. But it is also measured in terms of economic and political survival. As long as the school remains open, enrollment numbers stay high, and innovation is part of the curriculum, then the school will be a success. If the Duke presence there can play even a small role in the survival and growth of the school, then I think we can continue to say our own program is a success.
4. What do you hope DukeEngage students come away with after completing the Beijing program?
My first desire is for them to come away with a greater appreciation of how a middle that must depend on constant fund raising and volunteerism works in China. More importantly, I want them to learn about the political, economic, and social conditions of migrant life, what it means for individuals and families from all across the Chinese countryside to live in a city such as Beijing, to live without the social support system that was once assured under socialism, and to now struggle with everyday forms of discrimination, the privatization of health care and education, and how these people’s lives are so precariously linked to global capitalism and China’s place in the world system.
5. What personally have you come away with through your participation with DukeEngage?
What I have come away with is obviously a greater understanding of migrant labor and education issues in China, which was part of the goal from the very start. More practically, I have come away with a massively expanded social network in Beijing, not just in the academy, but in sectors of contemporary society I previously had limited access to – in the international and domestic non-governmental scene, in the world of Chinese and international journalism (because of the intense interest in the school), and in the corporate social responsibility scene.
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