Margaret Hillenbrand, professor at Oxford University, suggests that evictions in China provoke questions about the limits of inequality, exclusion and insecure work as meaningful descriptors of social conditions in our times. In this talk, Hillenbrand explores the logic of expulsion in contemporary China, its capacity to foment both solidarity and social strife, and its relationship with cultural forms. In particular, she looks at how people living under precarity in China today use culture as a space to vent feelings of rage, resentment, distrust and disdain that are taboo under the diktats of so-called harmonious society.

This public lecture is organized by the 21st Century China Center (21CCC) at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. For more information about this and other 21CCC events, please visit china.ucsd.edu.