Collaboration with WUN on women’s mobility in Asia

Prof. SONG Jing (1st left, front) hosts a conference on ‘Women’s Mobility: Negotiating Work and Family Spheres in Asia’ on campus.

Prof. SONG Jing of the Gender Studies Programme at CUHK received a grant from the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Research Development Fund (RDF) in 2018 to conduct a project titled ‘Women’s Mobility: Negotiating Work and Family Spheres in Asia’ which examines women’s mobility as a combined consequence of micro-level individual and family strategies and macro-level migration policies and trends in Asian societies. It has participation from four WUN member universities—The University of Sydney, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of York and Zhejiang University—and seven non-WUN member universities, including Fudan University and the University of Oxford.

Under the project, Prof. Song organised an international conference on campus in July 2019 and a conference panel at the 5th Congress of Asian Association of Women’s Studies held in South Korea in December 2019 where project team members met and presented their works. A special issue titled ‘Complexity of Chinese Family Life: Individualism, Familism and Gender’ addressing conflicting trends of individualism and familism among rural residents, migrating population, and urban households was produced and will be published in the forthcoming The China Review.

Prof. Song said, ‘The project is making great progress and we will hold a final meeting later this year to consolidate our findings and discuss future direction. The project has shed light on the changing role of women regarding their gender attitudes, work choices, migration patterns, intimate relations, marriage practices, fertility desires, and care-giving arrangements in contemporary China and other Asian societies.’

The WUN RDF is an annual scheme that provides seed funds to foster research collaborations among WUN members by supporting exploratory activities (e.g. workshops, visits and exchanges) with a view to launching larger and more impactful projects. The research topics should address one or more of the four Global Challenges, namely Global Higher Education and Research, Public Health, Responding to Climate Change, and Understanding Cultures. Application to the next round of RDF will be announced in summer 2020.