Miaomiao Qi

MIAOMIAO QI, then a graduate student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “Reimagining Agrarian Futures: Gender, Labor, and Agroecology in China’s Southwestern Peripheries,” supervised by Dr. John Aloysius Zinda. This research project examined the gendered and generational process of capitalist agrarian transition in rural China. Focusing on rural women’ everyday lives and work in sustaining family reproduction, this ethnographic work at the early stage revealed shifting dynamics of rural women’s livelihoods. While land and farming remain essential to their livelihoods as well as social-ecological connections to rural worlds, there is a general and increasing trend in engaging in informal wage employment. New trends of life-making are emerging, specifically, these rural women are now living a hypermobile lifestyle, constantly moving between both urban and rural and rural to rural spaces. For the second stage, fieldwork was refocused to follow various groups of rural women on the move, across home and workplaces, from their small plots to big fields and greenhouses. The evidence collected suggested a general change in rural women’s reproductive roles, pointing to a significant shift in gender and generational relations in China’s rural society. Lastly, instead of only focusing on either rural women’s smallholding practices or them as farmworkers, this multi-sited fieldwork examined simultaneous processes of agrarian changes across spatial boundaries and helped make theoretical connections between land concentration, labor markets, farming livelihoods, and rural social reproduction.