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DukeEngage Q&A: Ralph Litzinger on China

Cultural anthropologist's work with DukeEngage comes out of his research

Part of the Duke in China Series

Ralph Litzinger discusses the DukeEngage program at the Dandelion School in Beijing

In the three years since its establishment at the university, DukeEngage, the civic engagement program for undergraduates, has attracted more than 1500 student applications since its full launch year in 2007-08. 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 with students or a chance to enhance one's teaching back at Duke.

 

Ralph Litzinger is an associate professor of cultural anthropology and recently completed a seven-year term as director of the Asia/ Pacific Studies Institute. He has written extensively on ethnic minority politics, nationalism and the state in China, including the 2000 Duke University Press book, Other Chinas. Since the summer of 2008, 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.

 

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, many 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, Litzinger responds to questions about the evolution of his DukeEngage program in Beijing and how it has informed 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 Dandelion Middle School, the site of our Duke Engage Beijing project, has allowed me to put into place what I hope to be a long term research project on migrant workers. Specifically, I want to explore -- and I want my students to explore -- the place of education in the lives of the migrant families and children who now live in Beijing and have no formal access to school. So, while our Beijing project is about labor, and education, and migrant kids, and the tough choices that families make, it is also about larger national and international agendas to address the astonishing economic disparity and uneven access to education and resources that today characterizes China, and indeed much of the world.

 

 Through our partnership with a number of different non-governmental organizations and corporate social responsibility projects, including partners such as J.P. Morgan who first helped us get access to the school, we've also begun to understand something about the new social responsibility and volunteerism rage that is sweeping through China, and which became even more widespread after the devastating Earthquake in western Sichuan in May of 2008. Few scholars have begun to systematically study the politics and ethics and desires of corporate and government and non-governmental forms of social responsibility. In this sense, we think we are on the cutting edge of a new research terrain.

 

 

2. Given the other demands you face as a member of the Duke University 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 faculty experience?

 

 For me, as with many of my colleagues, the DukeEngage Beijing project is a massive amount of work. It simply takes a lot of time, energy and labor to set up and maintain this kind of project in China. I do this because of my commitment to make our work and research at the school and in Beijing part of a larger pedagogical process of reflecting on and constantly questioning what drives projects of advocacy, activism, and intervention, both historically and in our present moment.

At the same time, I am in a constant battle to convince some 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 better and more just forms of living in the social sciences and humanities at Duke. Admittedly, it is sometimes a hard sell. But I think we are on to something, if only because we have put ourselves in the thick of these issues in Beijing and at the school.

 

 

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 Beijing Migrant Education project generates each year among Duke students. But for me a better measure of success is that all 12 students who have volunteered at the school over the last two summers have come away from the program feeling like they have had to personally and collectively struggle to find ways to work productively with the staff, teachers, and students at the school. 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, students, or academics and has none of the usual amenities found in the more ritzy and cosmopolitan 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 way. 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 appreciate, is what has made our program a "success."

At the same time, it is important to point out that for the school, success is measured differently. It is measured in terms of how many kids stay in school, and how well those who remain in school do. Success is also measured in terms of economic and political survival. As long as the school remains open, enrollment numbers stay high, teachers come back year after year, and innovation is part of the curriculum, then we can start talking about success. Hopefully, the Duke presence can continue to play a small role in the continued survival and growth of the school.

 

 

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 an "unofficial" middle school set up for migrant kids constantly depends on creative fund raising efforts and volunteerism in China. I also want them to learn as much as possible 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. To be sure, I could package this knowledge for them in the classroom at Duke. But there is something about being there at the school that makes this a different kind of learning -- it is more immediate, more bodily, unconscious, all tied up with emotions and a constant questioning of why I am here, that can never be replicated in the classroom at Duke.

 

 

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. Let's face it: I have friends now in Beijing who are bankers, at a time when it is not very cool to be hanging out with the banking set! I like the risks of hanging out with the "wrong" kinds of people.