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UTS:ACRI WEBINAR: Dreams of Flight – in conversation with Fran Martin

In Dreams of Flight (Duke University Press, 2022) Fran Martin, Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, explores how young women from China negotiate competing pressures while studying in Australian universities. Unmarried middle-class students from the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professionals through international education, and mould themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. But they also face strong neo-traditionalist pressures from the state, society and their families that push them to marry and have a family before the age of 30.

A/Professor Martin’s extensive ethnographic and interviews-based research with students and their parents reveal their motivations for studying in Australia, and their experiences while here in everyday life in our cities, media use, work, romance, religion, and evolving feelings about their homeland. She uncovers the power of international education to transform a student's sense of self and their cultural identity. Dreams of Flight reveals how global education mobility is fundamentally transforming a whole generation of Chinese women.

In a webinar hosted by the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), A/Professor Martin will join UTS:ACRI Adjunct Professor Louise Edwards in conversation to discuss how this cohort of young women will impact the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) global futures and Australia’s relations with the PRC.

Dreams of Flight is available for purchase in paperback and e-book versions: https://www.dukeupress.edu/dreams-of-flight.

Jul 28, 2022 12:30 PM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney