Search

This paper explores how Muslim immigrants negotiate their family practices and religious identities in secular Guangzhou, a global city in south China, drawing on an in‐depth qualitative analysis. It provides a lens for better understanding the interrelationship between family practices, transnational mobility, and religious values spatially in the Chinese context. The key arguments of this research suggest that transnational mobility plays important roles in making, remaking, and unmaking of connections between family and religion. Moreover, both family spaces and religious spaces are dynamic and on the move. As an empirical study on family and religion in the Chinese context, this research can not only be read as a contribution to family and religious geographies in an everyday setting, but also one of the first everyday geography studies of Islam and Muslims in globalised China. This paper provides a lens for better understanding of the intersection of family practices and religion. We argue in this empirical analysis that transnational mobility plays important roles in the making, remaking, and unmaking of the connections between family and religion. Moreover, we indicate that focusing on the interrelationships between family and religion can nuance understanding of how notions of family and family spaces are reproduced through daily religious practices and how processes of doing family and doing religion are spatially entangled, as both family spaces and religious spaces are dynamic and on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the modelling of green urbanism is spatially manifested in flagship eco-city projects such as the Sino- Singapore Tianjin eco-city ( SSTE) project. As part of a multi-scalar process that taps into a host of mobile policy networks and 'quick fix' urban policy solutions that circulate around the world, such eco-flagship prestige projects serve as powerful sites for the convergence of the boundaries between the social and technical and are highly symbolic places charged with the formidable task of constructing purportedly new forms of ecological urban imagineering and socio-ecological lifeworlds. But to the extent that these eco-flagship projects are often underwritten by state-business growth coalition and driven by (green) entrepreneurial objectives, these urban ecological spaces are also necessarily implicated in broader normative debates and the challenge of constructing sustainable and socially just urban futures. As David Harvey has pointed out, insofar as all environmental-ecological arguments are arguments about society and, therefore, complex refractions of all sorts of struggles being waged on other realms, eco-cities in China both reflect and embody the multiple contradictory tensions inherent in contemporary Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing academic interest focused on Chinese cities, there has been relatively little sustained theoretical and empirical engagement with critical approaches that have enlivened urban geography over the past 30 years. In this paper we seek to advance this research agenda by focusing on embodied urban geographies. More specifically, we consider case studies of dance and massage in order to show how critical engagement with everyday social and cultural forms and practices has much to offer understanding of urban life in China. Discussing theoretical terrain relating to dance and massage with reference to public/private space, individual/collective practices and experiences, and comfort/discomfort, we also signpost important contributions that critical research into Chinese urbanism can make to broader debates within and beyond urban geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]