Diane Wong

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 1 - July 26) :

Large cities around the world are facing an unprecedented housing crisis; approximately 1.6 billion people are inadequately housed, while one hundred million are homeless and sixty million are forcibly displaced from their homes. Professor Wong’s research is interdisciplinary and underscores the intimacies of home in shaping political possibilities and diasporic intimacies. Building on her current research-- which examines the political impacts of gentrification in Chinatowns across the United States-- this project expands the scope of her scholarship to investigate how residents in Shanghai, China are responding to forced evictions and uprootedness. Drawing from ethnographic research, archival materials, and oral history interviews with residents across three generations in Shanghai, this project will provide a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which residents are active in the making of urban space and urban politics. This project will focus on three specific neighborhoods in Shanghai, including Xintiandi, Laoximen, and Luowan – a place where her own family was displaced thirty years ago. Given that encounters with forced eviction and displacement has come to increasingly shape the lives of residents in the rapidly changing city, Professor Wong’s research will provide a useful lens to learn about how those who have limited resources and access to formal institutions have fought to stay in their homes. Professor Wong’s primary goals for the project are to preserve place-based knowledge as told by former residents themselves, document strategies of resistance to displacement from past to present, and interrogate the sociocultural boundaries of the urban Chinese diaspora. This project will not only draw critical connections between the displacement occurring in American Chinatowns to the neighborhood changes in Shanghai, it will also result in an open access, web-based digital public history project which would involve the digitization, visualization, and dissemination of the materials collected over the summer. As neighborhoods in large cities like Shanghai continue to disappear due to modernization, and residents are uprooted from their homes, it is important that these individual and collective narratives also at risk of being displaced are well preserved for future generations.