A Personal Perspective on Doing Good Research Seminar Series – Professor PUN Ngai

About the Speaker

Professor PUN Ngai

Chair Professor of Cultural Studies

Biography

Professor Pun Ngai is the Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, where she also directs the Centre for Cultural Research and Development. She graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and won the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for her first book, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). Made in China is widely used as required reading in major universities in America, Europe, and Asia. Together with Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), these two texts have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese.

Abstract

In this seminar, Professor Pun Ngai discusses her new book project on the remaking of the Chinese working class. Entering history, entering movement; this book project is contextualised within a conjunction of infrastructural capitalism in Chinese Mainland and the formation of the Chinese working class.

Turning the concept of infrastructural power upside down, she develops the notion of labour infrastructural power to move beyond the dichotomous view of capitalism and labour. Taking a relational class analysis seriously, while the power of labour could, in certain circumstances, affect or subvert spatial fixes in terms of economic zones, specific sectors, industries, or workplaces at certain times, labour agency is deeply ingrained in the structure and context of infrastructural capitalism as a dialectical process between capital and labour.