The workshop ‘Precariously Yours: Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai’ took place between December 4-6 2014 in various locations in Shanghai. In this workshop we have extended the notion of precarity towards the domains of gender, love and sexuality. The topic ‘single women’ served as a prism to explore the complexities which surround precarity, urbanity and class. The HERA SINGLE members and their invited guests aimed at answering the following questions: How do single women negotiate the multiple expectations and demands that society imposes upon them? What are their tactics of resistance against normative gender roles and expectations? How do they negotiate the gendering of urban space? How to love in a city that never stays the same? How to navigate through the city, as a young woman without getting lost or feeling unsafe? How to imagine the city as a more intimate and fragile space? What is to be lost and gained in remaining a single woman?
The workshop zoomed in on how tropes like shengnü (leftover women) can be read as imaginations of a ‘new’ Asian femininity, how different modes of love and desire are explored in diverse creative and sexual cultures in Asian cities, and how art and activism attempt to intervene in hegemonic understandings of love, gender and sexuality.

Here you can download the programme flyer of the SINGLE workshop (Pdf, 0.4 Mb).

 
Further information

– Workshop Concept Note

– Workshop Programme

– Abstracts

Impressions from the Shanghai workshop (December 4-6 2014) and the art exhibition (December 6′, 2014)

Programme and participants list of the HERA JRP Cultural Encounters Conference (Pdf, 0.9 Mb)

Programme flyer of the SINGLE workshop ‘Precariously Yours: Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai’ (Pdf, 0.4 Mb)

Nishtha Jain

The filmmaker Nishtha Jain graduated from the Jamia Mass Communication Centre in New Delhi. She worked as an editor and correspondent for video news magazines Newstrack and Eyewitness before she studies at the Film and Television Institute of India, specializing in film direction. From her first film City of Photos in 2004 to Gulabi Gang in 2012, she has been exploring the human condition in its myriad states. As a result, her films have dealt with a broad range of topics, such as complexities of social hierarchies and the middle-class sense of entitlement and privilege or women’s movements and social change. Also, politics of image-making and nature of memory, as well as ethical implications of documentary filmmaking have also been addressed in her work. Her films have been shown extensively in international film festivals and occasionally in art exhibitions. They have won several prestigious awards and been broadcast on international TV networks and regularly shown in schools and colleges in India and abroad.

The film screening will be introduced by Roos Gerritsen, lecturer at the Institute of Anthropology at Heidelberg University, who will also moderate the question and answer session with Nishtha Jain following the screening. The event is financed by the HERA-project “SINGLE” and the South Asia Institute (SAI) of Heidelberg University.

Watch the film trailer on YouTube. (external link)

The Kick-off workshop took place from December 5 to 7, 2013 at the Karl Jaspers Centre in Heidelberg. During the workshop all individual projects were presented, common key terms defined, and publication strategies along with possible cooperations with individuals and institutions were discussed. Moreover, the dates for the next workshops were scheduled: one collaborative workshop with the Digital Humanities department of the Cluster Asia & Europe in a Global Context of Heidelberg University, called Heidelberg Research Architecture or HRA in short. Another workshop will be held in Shanghai at the beginning of December 2014.
This workshop served to introduce the HRA and HERA SINGLE members and for the latter to get familiar with DH tools such as the HRA’s metadata framework Tamboti, a multimedia database which can be used to annotate and cross-reference video, audio, image and text material. It was the start of the collaborative research and development endeavour between HERA SINGLE and the HRA.

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Prof. Aparna Rayaprol is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad who works on Indian feminism, remigration and Diaspora. Prof. Rayaprol met with SINGLE project members to discuss the different waves of feminism in India and shared her concerns about the current gender politics. She also elaborated on the construction of masculinity in the city as well as feminization of public space and the role of remigration in the contemporary urban landscapes of Indian cities especially in relation to the lives of single women.

Prof. Saraswati Raju

Prof. Saraswati Raju is Professor of Social Geography at Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi and has worked extensively on gender and space in South Asia. At the meeting with Single project members she elaborated on the entanglement of employment, space and gender and the role of location for gendered practices. Prof. Raju also shared her advice on research methods and research design and recommended relevant reading for each research project.

Arunava Dasgupta

Arunava Dasgupta is Professor of Urban Design at the School of Planning and Architecture and works on citizen design strategies, restructuring of metro cities and urbanization in North India. He talked to SINGLE Project members about issues of safety in and identified ‘problem areas’ in Delhi. He further highlighted the importance of community networks and transport facilities for single women. Possibilities for collaborations between Single project members and the School of Architecture and Planning in Delhi were also discussed.