Browsing by Author "Wang, Yifan"

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    Born to Age: The Industrialization of Eldercare and The Making of Aging Subjects in Urban China
    (2023-04-21) Wang, Yifan; Faubion, James
    If China’s over three decades of implementation of birth planning policies had sought to contain a crisis of overpopulation, today, as the global productivity epicenter, China is reconceptualizing the crisis as population aging. This sea change has culminated in China’s recent calls to industrialize eldercare in the face of diminishing family-based care provision. This industrialization is reshaping the eldercare landscape and giving rise to new care ethics, subject positions, and a mushrooming field of service and goods for consumption. My dissertation studies how aging has become a dominant way of describing and understanding life and the future in China today. On the one hand, it explores how this state-fostered and market-driven industry operates among the state’s population, welfare, and economic policies, market competitions, and ordinary people. On the other hand, it shows how people come to terms with aging differently through the mediation of the eldercare industry. This dissertation is primarily based on fieldwork at Gardenview, an eldercare company that runs several residential eldercare facilities in Nanjing and neighboring metropolitan cities, including Shanghai and Hangzhou. Between 2017 and 2020, I conducted a total of 14 months of fieldwork with Gardenview and at eldercare-themed exhibitions, summits, and forums. In addition, the dissertation is built on two archival research projects, with one examining how the concept of the population has been called upon in the Chinese Communist Party’s official discourses and the other tracing a series of welfare production exhibitions organized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1958. Drawing on diverse empirical and archival data, my dissertation elaborates on three overarching arguments. First, the industrialization of eldercare in China has transformed eldercare from a long-established family duty into a socioeconomic enterprise, configuring and reconfiguring the relationship between care ethics and market incentives. Second, the viability of this eldercare industry is further predicated upon a demographic sensibility—a collective and historically rehearsed feeling towards the population that the industry, in turn, actively recalibrates. Finally, the fostering of the eldercare market and the feeling of the population together create new aging subjects that fuel social and economic productivity through consumption.
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    Fondren Fellow final report: The usage of Fondren Library in an age of research-oriented college education
    (Rice University, 2019) Kanemitsu, Jade; Wang, Yifan
    What is Fondren Library’s role in Rice University’s undergraduate teaching practices? And more broadly, how is Fondren, as a research university library, understood in today’s pedagogical environment? This research seeks to look at Fondren Library’s current practices and their effects and to understand how the library services address key issues—or not—in the research processes and what could be improved to better adjust to today’s research practices. More broadly, our research seeks to shed light on what kind of roles that research university libraries can play in today’s higher education. In conjunction with the implementation of the Inquiry-based Learning (IBL) initiative at Rice, especially considering that the initiative has now become a significant influence in how undergraduate classes are instructed and restructured at Rice, the researchers work with participating instructors to study how research skills are currently cultivated through coursework. Specifically, the researchers seek to understand how Fondren’s resources—not so much book collections as research supports of all kinds—are utilized by instructors and students as they gain expertise in inquiry-based learning. The results of the research are intended to provide insights into how Fondren, as a research library, could advance its services to better meet the needs arising from today’s research-oriented university education goals. To gain firsthand knowledge about how Fondren’s services and resources are utilized in the curricula and practiced by students, during the spring semester of 2019, the researchers deployed a series of research methods, from text analysis to interviews and surveys. Through the process, the researchers familiarized themselves with the IBL-implemented classes, charted the discrepancies between the expectations set in teaching goals and the actual learning practices, and piloted a survey that begins to address such discrepancies. By the end of the study, the researchers offered some suggestions and directions that Fondren could take initiatives towards.