Professor Pun Ngai, the author of the award-winning book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), is coming to Cambridge and she is going to give a talk about her latest research on working-class youth in China. Please see below for the abstract.

Critical Rethinking on Working-Class Youth Solidarity: The Case of China

Based on post-industrial society experiences, social theorists argue that the working class no longer plays an active role in transforming society, thereby making the issue of working-class solidarity obsolete. This paper critically revisits Marx's theories on solidarity and re-engages the debates by intersecting macro structural analysis with micro-foundation of working-class solidarity. We formulate the concept of working-class solidarity in two layers of analysis: the first is a macro structural approach driven by class conflict, social grievance and economic crisis directly connected to the social transformation of the neoliberal market economy; and the second looks at micro process of cooperation and mutual support at the level of everyday practice, that is, a collective-emotional environment that creates agency and soft solidarity base for building bonding among the working-class youth. The logic of solidarity is rescued through a multiplicity of working-class youth's behaviors discovered in school and the workplace. 

Professor PUN Ngai is a public sociologist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. She was honored as winner of C. Wright Mills Award for her book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005). Her co-authored, Dying for iPhone: Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers has been translated into six languages. She is the author of Migrant Labor in China: Post Socialist Transformation (2016).