Dr. Sarah Swider Publishes Book
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Sarah Swider who has a new book entitled "Building China, Informal Work and the New Precariat." The book is published by Cornell University Press, who summarizes it, in part, as follows: 
"Roughly 260 million workers in China have participated in a mass migration of peasants moving into the cities, and construction workers account for almost half of them. In Building China, Sarah Swider draws on her research in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai between 2004 and 2012, including living in an enclave, working on construction jobsites, and interviews with eighty-three migrants, managers, and labor contractors. This ethnography focuses on the lives, work, family, and social relations of construction workers. It adds to our understanding of China's new working class, the deepening rural-urban divide, and the growing number of undocumented migrants working outside the protection of labor laws and regulation. Swider shows how these migrantsmembers of the global "precariat," an emergent social force based on vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertaintyare changing China's class structure and what this means for the prospects for an independent labor movement." Cornell University Press website www.cornellpress.cornell.edu
In addition, Dr. Swider's book has been welcomed with excellent reviews:
"In Building China, Sarah Swider provides a fascinating, in-depth, and deeply empathetic view into the diverse range of labor structures emerging in modern China. This book makes male migrant construction workers visible, drawing the reader into the complex texture of their daily lives through clear, almost novelistic, prose and extremely rich and persuasive empirical research."Rina Agarwala, The Johns Hopkins University, author of Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India "Sarah Swider uses rich ethnographic materials in Building China to investigate a kind of worker rarely studied. Insightfully applying the concept of employment configuration, she investigates some of the mechanisms that push workers into informal employment."Feng Xu, University of Victoria, author of Looking for Work in Post-Socialist China: Governance, Active Job Seekers and the New Chinese Labor Market "This fascinating book highlights a chilling fact, that the Chinese precariat is the largest in the world. As elsewhere, its characteristics are chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, volatile earnings and a loss of rights associated with citizenship. Migrants make up a large part of the precariat, as they do everywhere. The primary question is, Will the Chinese precariat join the precariat in other countries in demanding a new progressive politics driven by its unique combination of circumstances? Building China should be required reading for those interested in how the global class structure is taking shape."Guy Standing, University of London "With this excellent ethnography, Sarah Swider breaks new ground in China labor research. She shares incredible insights gained while living and working with migrant construction workers and concludes that we need a new way of framing informal worka concept applicable not just to Chinese construction workers, but to informal work worldwide. Well done!"Katie Quan, University of California, Berkeley |
Congratulations Dr. Swider!