Yanqiu Rachel Zhou

Rethinking silence in the classroom: Chinese students’ experiences of sharing indigenous knowledge

Recent research has documented silence/reticence among East‐Asian international students, including Chinese students, in Western/English classrooms. Students’ communication competence and cultural differences from the mainstream Euro‐American society have been identified as two primary barriers to participation. Placing emphasis on individual characteristics of Chinese students, however, without considering aspects of the educational context with which those characteristics interact, may over‐simplify and distort the mechanism underlying their silence in the classroom. Based on a qualitative study of Chinese students’ experience of sharing indigenous knowledge in classroom settings of Canadian academic institutions, it is argued that the pursuit of diversity in the classroom may be compromised by classroom interactions, through which, for instance, the dynamics and quality of the knowledge exchange of students from different socio‐cultural backgrounds may be adversely affected. Within this conceptual framework, the concepts ‘silence’, ‘culture difference’ and ‘indigenous knowledge’ are re‐examined; the concepts ‘reciprocal cultural familiarity’ and ‘inclusive knowledge sharing’ are advocated. … [W]hen I did participate, mostly because I was required to. … Students took turns to present something and that is your topic. You have to say something but even then I didn’t feel that good because it seems … they didn’t feel that interested, … like they couldn’t follow my ideas, follow my perspective. And so it seems difficult to communicate. I think that is not just because of the language, it seems we see the same thing in different ways.   (Chinese student in this study)

Endangered Womanhood: Women's Experiences With HIV/AIDS in China:

Women in China are increasingly affected by HIV/AIDS. Current AIDS studies have examined the HIV risks faced by this gender group, paying inadequate attention to womens actual experiences with the disease. This oversight has inhibited our ability to understand the impact of gender on womens capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS in their postinfection lives. Based on a qualitative study on illness experiences of HIV-infected people, this article examines the interactions between HIV/AIDS and gender roles in the Chinese context. It was found that traditional gender norms have played a key role for HIV-infected women in their efforts to tackle this disease and to make sense of their daily lives. HIV infection has created a conflict between womens intention to fulfill their conception of “womanhood” and a decreased ability to do so, which, in turn, has adversely affected their self-perceptions and well-being. To avoid worsening the inequality women experience, therefore, we must also work on the socioeconomic conditions, for example, through delivering comprehensive care to affected families and developing a gender-sensitive welfare policy, so that the gender imparity that permeates this epidemic can be challenged and transformed.

The phenomenology of time: Lived experiences of people with HIV/AIDS in China

Based on a qualitative study of lived experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS in China, this article explores the role of time — in particular, time as lived (or, perceptual time) — in these individuals’ construction and reconstruction of the meanings of their illness experiences. Although their HIV infection interrupted the linear flow of time, the end of which is death, they had reconstructed the meanings of time according to their priorities in the process of living with this disease. Making sense of time beyond a linear time framework benefited these individuals by enabling them to restore their control over their lives and transform a process of deteriorating and dying into a process of living and growing. It is concluded that time, as a distinct form of illness experience, merits further examination in future AIDS research as well as in health research.

Toward transnational care interdependence: Rethinking the relationships between care, immigration and social policy

The intersections of international migration, care and welfare states have attracted increasing attention from social policy scholars, yet the focus on the commodification of care has led them largely to ignore kin-based unpaid care. Based on a study of Chinese grandparents’ caregiving experiences in Canada, this article shows how transnational families of Chinese skilled immigrants have participated in redistributing care resources, including emotion, time and cultural knowledge, across generations and countries. The article argues that states – in particular, the government of Canada as the host country – still have a crucial role to play in untangling the contradictions of immigration and care and addressing the inequalities embedded in transnational caregiving. To pursue global social justice, social policy makers need to take into account policy effects that go beyond the nation-state and its citizenry and intersect with such aspects of immigration as the spatial reconfiguration of the family, cultural change and ageing.

Culture, but more than culture: an exploratory study of the HIV vulnerability of Indian immigrants in Canada

Abstract Explanations of immigrant health that ascribe to culture a fundamental causal role neglect the broader structural and contextual factors with which culture intersects. Based on a qualitative study of Indian immigrants’ vulnerability to HIV in Canada, this paper presents a contextualised understanding of these individuals’ understanding of, perceptions about, and responses to the HIV risk in their post-immigration lives. The study reveals that although culture – both traditional values and the norms of the diaspora community – appears to have constrained Indian immigrants’ capacities to respond to the risk, this effect can be properly understood only by situating such constraint in the context of the settlement process that has shaped participants’ living conditions, including their relationship with the diasporic community in Canada. We argue that HIV vulnerability should be conceptualised as a health inequality associated with broader systems of power relations (eg socio-economic marginalisation, gender inequality, discrimination, and racism). This more holistic conceptualisation of the intersection of culture, integration, and HIV vulnerability will facilitate exploration of HIV prevention strategies, through which interconnected inequalities of gender, race, and access to knowledge and resources can be challenged.

‘Race’ and HIV vulnerability in a transnational context: the case of Chinese immigrants to Canada

Abstract Although immigrants’ sustained connections with their homelands are well documented, so far we know little about how ‘race’ – in particular, conceptions of race back home – influences the HIV vulnerability of racialised immigrants to Western countries. Drawing on data from a multi-sited, qualitative study of Chinese immigrants to Canada, this paper presents a contextualised understanding of the impacts of race on HIV risk faced by these individuals in a transnational context. Data were collected from four study sites in Canada and China as part of a study investigating the relationship between HIV risk and transnationalism. Although race appears to have bearing on their risk perceptions and sexual practices, immigrants’ understandings of race are not necessarily consistent with dominant discourses of race in Canada, but are also mediated by their racial habitus developed in China. Findings reveal the complex power dynamics – not just power asymmetries but also power fluidity – around race from a transnational perspective and thus challenge the assumed dichotomy of dominance and subordination underpinning traditional explanations of the relationship between race and HIV risk. In the context of transnationalism, researchers should go beyond a nation-bound concept of society (i.e. the host society) and take into account the simultaneous influence of both host and home countries on immigrant health.

''It's a forced separation ( ... ) and we've got used to this kind of life'': changing dynamics of HIV risk in the context of immigration

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the impacts of immigration processes on the HIV risk faced by mainland Chinese immigrants in Canada.Design/methodology/approach – Drawn from a larger qualitative study on the vulnerability to HIV of recent immigrants to Canada, the data presented were collected through individual, face‐to‐face, semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews with 34 mainland‐Chinese immigrant adults who perceived themselves as facing sexual health risks (including HIV infection) through engaging in unsafe sex.Findings – Immigration processes have not only exposed these immigrants to a HIV risk that they did not face in China; they have also compromised their capacity to effectively respond to it. In light of various settlement difficulties, HIV risk is neither the only nor the most urgent challenge that they have faced in their post‐immigration lives.Research limitations/implications – The HIV risk under discussion must be understood by situating it in the processes of immigration, settlement, an...

Accelerated Contagion and Response: Understanding the Relationships among Globalization, Time, and Disease

Abstract The rapid global transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 raises questions about the intersections of globalization, time, and diseases. Viewing it as a disease of speed, this article examines SARS as a case of emerging infectious diseases in the context of contemporary globalization. We contend that the SARS crisis exposed the limitations of traditional spatiality-based approaches to infectious diseases, disease control, and health governance. When the advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in recent decades have accelerated the diffusion of pathogens, actors at all levels of global public health are pressed to keep up with the new temporalities. While cognitive and organizational innovations arising from technological changes show some hope for addressing these issues on a global level, other temporality-related challenges—such as differential capacities of the affected countries to respond to the simultaneity of the crisis—are yet to be tackled.

Exploring the Intersection of Time and Globalization

. On 30 September 2014, Thomas Eric Duncan—a 42-year-old Liberian citizen who had traveled to Dallas, Texas to visit family—became the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola hemorrhagic fever in North America. By adding the USA to the list of countries with confirmed Ebola cases, Duncan’s diagnosis and subsequent death exacerbated a simmering global panic over the potential worldwide transmission of the highly lethal disease, whose previous outbreaks had not spread significantly beyond their initial sites of emergence. It was subsequently revealed that the period between his initial infection and ultimate diagnosis saw Duncan travel thousands of kilometers across three continents while remaining unknown to either national or global public health authorities (‘Retracing the steps of the Dallas Ebola patient’, 2014). . On 12 November 2014, US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping made a surprise announcement that their respective states—the world’s two largest economies, energy consumers, and carbon emitters—had reached an agreement to jointly limit greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades. Under the terms of the pact, the USA is required to reduce emissions to 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2025, while China pledged

Time, space and care: Rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective

Against the background of unprecedented international migration, it is not clear how people’s transnational mobility and ties have intersected with the temporalities associated with places or spaces. Drawing on the data from an empirical study of the caregiving experiences of Chinese grandparents in Canada, this case study reveals the simultaneous, yet uneven, temporal impacts of transnational care on individual, familial, and transnational levels. Although the coexistence of multiple temporalities enables Chinese skilled immigrant families to mobilize care resources across generations and nation-states, the dominance of the neoliberal temporal framework also means various consequences of such transnational ‘flexibility’. I argue that rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective helps us identify the linkages, discrepancies and contradictions between ‘global time’ and peripheral temporalities and between time and space, and thus makes visible the inequalities – in particular, the temporal inequalities – embedded in human migration and social relations on a transnational scale.