200309 - Chinese Migrant Communities in Germany: Heritage Language, Identities and Ideologies

Seminar Migrations and Multiculturalism* "Chinese Migrant Communities in Germany: Heritage Language, Identities and Ideologies", (PDF, 99 Ko)

Session in collaboration with the project « Émergence(s) 2018-2021 - Ville de Paris »
Chinois.es en Île-de-France (The Chinese Population in Paris: Identities and Identifications under Transformation)

Monday 9 March 2020, 5-7 pm, Sciences Po, Room Jean Monnet, 56 rue Jacob Monnet, 75006 Paris

Chinese migration to Germany has a long and winding history, while extant scholarship on this topic is far and few between. The talk will briefly present the history and waves of Chinese migration to Germany, as well as early community-building efforts. Wang Zi then examines issues of identity and ideology from the vantage point of heritage language based on data and analysis from field studies with various Chinese communities in Germany, notably in the setting of heritage language schools. Wang Zi shows that such schools are charged with the mission of doing much more than just transmitting a language. For instance, teaching materials reveal that this is also a milieu in which ideological conflicts and questions of legitimacy play out, especially between Chinese and Taiwanese-run schools. Moreover, findings reveal that migrants often use heritage language as a tool to gain further skills, with the aim of better integrating into the host society and workforce. Such preliminary results call for a rethinking of the functions of migrants’ languages of origin in a host society, as well as implications for multilingualism policies.

Speaker: Wang Zi, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute of East Asian Studies & Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher

Wang Zi is co-investigator of a three-year research project on happiness, migration, and language. Fully funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this project examines effects of heritage cultural maintenance and migrants’ state of subjective wellbeing in Germany, with special emphasis on the Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish populations. Besides migration and happiness studies, his other research interests include education (particularly Japan and East Asia), ethnography, and the school-to-work transition of youths (East Asia-Europe comparative studies).

His research includes comparative education (East Asia and Europe), critical discourse analysis, ethnographic methods in area studies, happiness, migration, sociology of language, youth studies.

Discussion: Hélène Le Bail, CNRS Research Fellow, Sciences Po, CERI & Yu-Sion Live, Senior Research Fellow, Université de la Réunion

Contact: virginie.guiraudon@sciencespo.fr

*The "Migration and Multiculturalism" seminar merges with that of Sciences Po's new Migration group, whose first session will take place on March 19 at 5 pm and will host researchers Doug Massey and Susan Fiske.

Compulsory registration - For the external people to Sciences Po: You will have to arrive 10 minutes before the beginning of the seminar and to provide you with your identity papers)