Urban custodians and hospitable citizens: citizenship and social actions at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2018, this article explores how liberal arts educational institutions are promulgating citizenship ideas about moral and character development, as well as the ways in which young people’s social actions are informed by these citizenship narratives alongside wider socio-economic and political norms governing the urban subject. We discuss two emergent political subjectivities – the urban custodian and the hospitable citizen – to demonstrate students’ civic actions as political work in their ongoing efforts to generate change in their urban relations and conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth politics
• urban politics
• liberal arts universities
• higher education citizenship
• Asia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their productive feedback, and the editorial team for moving this article forward. We are grateful to our respondents for participating in this research. Thanks also to participants of the Youth Politics in Urban Asia session at RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2018, where this paper was presented. Special thanks to our student researchers Jason Yeung and Elesin Teo at Yale-NUS College for providing fieldwork assistance and company in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yi'En Cheng is Research Fellow in the Asian Migration cluster at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His research lies at the intersection across education, youth, and mobilities in and across Asian cities. He is currently investigator on a project that examines how the Belt and Road Initiative is shifting higher education and student mobilities in the Asean region. His works are published in journals such as Annals of Association of American Geographers, Antipode, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Society, and Social & Cultural Geography. He is co-editor of the special issues ‘Geographies of Citizenship in Higher Education’ in Area with Mark Holton and ‘Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies with Shanthi Robertson and Brenda Yeoh. Prior to joining ARI, Yi'En was Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

Jane Margaret Jacobs is Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Her research is in the field of urban studies, with a particular interest in cultural aspects of the production and consumption of the built environment. Prior to joining Yale-NUS College, Prof Jacobs held positions at the University College London, The University of Melbourne and University of Edinburgh. She is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and has been a recipient of funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, the Australian Research Council, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. She has served on the editorial board of various journals including Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Scottish Geographical Journal, Cultural Studies Review, Social and Cultural Geographies, Transactions IBG (NS), Gender, Place and Culture, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Antipode.

ORCID

Yi’En Cheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8897-0372

Notes

1 Other scholars have gone on to challenge the narrow and static container view of university-city relationships as territorially restrained, when both cities and universities are increasingly shaped by transnational interactions and flows of ideas, people, and capital (Addie, 2017; Collins & Ho, 2014).

2 Research undertaken at all three institutions received ethical clearance. While this article focuses on the cases of Lingnan and NYU-Shanghai, a discussion of how student identities and citizenship subjectivities are produced, negotiated, and experimented at Yale-NUS is available (see Cheng, 2018).

3 The 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill protests lasting more than 14 weeks (at the time this article was submitted) have completely overturned this media portrayal of the disenchanted Hong Konger youth.

4 Lam-Knott (forthcoming) also argues that a value shift among Hong Kong youth has led to a form of moralist activism driven by a desire to ‘do good’ and to ‘better’ the city in socio-political terms.

5 See also Xu (2015) for a discussion of how mainland Chinese students negotiate the mainlandization discourse.

Additional information

Funding

This research was fully supported by the Yale-NUS College Internal Grant (IG16-LR106), Project name: Liberal Arts Experiments in Asia: Redefining Education, Economy, and Citizenship.