Becoming modern urban citizens: The experience of schooling, intergenerational relations and social identity formation among rural-urban migrant children in China.

Abstract

The rural-urban migrant children in China has become a hot spot in different disciplines. This dissertation concentrates on the schooling experiences, intergeneration relations and urban experiences of migrant children in Qingdao to unpack their understandings of education, the urban-rural dichotomy and their social positions in the city. The research is established in two main clues. The first task of my research is to explore migrant children's educational trajectories in the city. The second task investigates how migrant children shape and reshape their social identities in the urban-rural dichotomy.

I selected five migrant children as the key participants of my research. By employing participant observation, I got a valuable chance to participate in children's daily lives over six months. Even when I left the field, I still maintained connections with these children through online chatting. Through intensive fieldwork, my research unravelled how the educational system reproduced the social structure by displaying social inequalities hidden in migrant children's everyday school experiences. As a result, most migrant children were educated to be manual labour repeating their parents' fate. My research also illustrated that the urban-rural dichotomy excluded migrant children from becoming urban citizens. Importantly, I also paid attention to children's agency by analysing their aspirations. All participants expressed their strong desires to live and work in the city rather than return to the rural villages. The children's careers aspirations reflected that they positioned themselves as 'future citizens' or 'new citizens', which helped me capture the interplay of structural constraints and individual agency.

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ORCID for Adriana Patino: orcid.org/0000-0003-1950-3954

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