Caroline Grillot

Bio: Caroline Grillot is an academic researcher from Macquarie University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Gender studies & Neoliberalism (international relations). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 280 citations.

Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

Abstract: COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.

Embodied by state borders: citizenship negotiations of children in Chinese–foreign families in the People’s Republic of China*

Abstract: The citizenship of Chinese–foreign children who have been brought up in China is an area of increasing political relevance because of their growing numbers and public visibility, as well as the high status accorded to children in the political agenda of the Communist Party, and wider debates on Chinese citizenship, identity and belonging. In this article we examine how decisions about children’s citizenship are made across national and generational divides in different family contexts in China, namely in Chinese–Vietnamese, Chinese–Russian, Chinese-Ukrainian, and Chinese–Cameroonian families. We tease out contestations between foreign and Chinese parents and grandparents and discuss how gender, socioeconomic, and racial dimensions affect children's citizenship negotiations in these multigenerational households. We argue that the bodies of the Chinese-foreign children occupy a prominent place in the territorialising practices of Chinese citizenship that are shaped by gendered, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities.

The Chinese path to individualization.

Abstract: This article explores the rise of the individual and the consequential individualization of society which should be viewed as a reflexive part of China's state-sponsored quest for modernity. It traces the origin of the individualization process to the Maoist era, arguing that some collectivist programmes of social engineering and the socialist path of modernization under Maoism ironically resulted in a partial individualization of Chinese society. Examining profound social changes during the three decades of the post-Mao reforms, the article reveals a number of similarities with the individualization process in Western Europe but also demonstrates some important differences. In the last section, the theoretical implications of the Chinese case in light of Ulrich Beck's theory of individualization and second modernity are discussed.

Is China Becoming Neoliberal

Abstract: Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberaliza...

Economies of affect

Abstract: This article develops the concept ‘economies of affect’ to argue for increased anthropological attention to the roles of affect in facilitating economic transformations. The article draws on evidence from two ethnographic field projects, one in Mexico and the other in Indonesia, to show how affect was mobilized to create subjects commensurable with neoliberal norms. We show how embracing and crying and discourses about love and grief were conjoined to transformations that entailed the cessation of state guarantees and the introduction of market norms. In posing affect and its articulation with questions of economic change as an object of anthropological inquiry, the article argues for the utility of a notion of affect in contrast to other approaches that have stressed emotion. We argue that affect is useful because it is inherently reflexive and intersubjective. Affect refers to relations practised between individuals, in contrast to emotion, which still bears the spectre of a psychological individualism. Resume Cet article developpe le concept des «economies de l'affect» pour attirer l'attention des anthropologues sur le role de l'affect dans la facilitation des transformations economiques. Il s'appuie sur les resultats de deux projets de terrain ethnographiques, l'un au Mexique et l'autre en Indonesie, pour montrer comment l'affect a ete mobilise pour creer des sujets pouvant etre apprehendes selon les normes neoliberales. Les auteurs montrent comment l'etreinte, les pleurs et les discours sur l'amour et le chagrin ont ete associes a des transformations impliquant la cessation de prestations de l'Etat et l'application des lois du marche. En faisant de l'affect et de son articulation avec le changement economique un objet d'etude anthropologique, l'article affirme l'utilite d'une notion d'affect se demarquant d'autres approches qui mettent l'accent sur l'emotion. Les auteurs affirment que l'affect est utile parce qu'il est, par nature, reflexif et intersubjectif. L'affect renvoie aux relations pratiquees entre les individus, a la difference de l'emotion, toujours marquee par le spectre d'un individualisme psychologique.

Cultivating Citizens: Suzhi (Quality) Discourse in the PRC

Abstract: In contemporary China, concerns about the suzhi , or "quality," of individuals, groups, and populations pervade the social imagination and inform a wide spectrum of discourses and debates. Suzhi is of critical importance to contemporary China's booming, globally oriented market economy, to new, "postsocialist" forms of state governance and social control, and to contemporary processes of citizenship. This essay first provides some background discussion of the historical development and contemporary significance of suzhi discourse in China and briefly reviews existing literature relating to it. It then introduces each of the subsequent essays in this special issue on suzhi and explains the connections between them.

Hacking with Chinese Characteristics The Promises of the Maker Movement against China’s Manufacturing Culture

Abstract: From the rising number of hackerspaces to an increase in hardware start-ups, maker culture is envisioned as an enabler of the next industrial revolution—a source of unhindered technological innovation, a revamp of broken economies and educational systems. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, this article examines how China’s makers demarcate Chinese manufacturing as a site of expertise in implementing this vision. China’s makers demonstrate that the future of making—if to materialize in the ways currently envisioned by writers, politicians, and scholars of the global tech industry—rests on taking seriously the technological and cultural fabrics of professional making outside familiar information technology innovation hubs like Silicon Valley: making-do, mass production, and reuse. I trace back to China’s first hackerspace, documenting how a collective of makers began to move away from appropriating Western concepts of openness toward promoting China as source for knowledge, creativity, and innova...