With Dr. Pei-Chia Lan (Distinguished Professor of Sociology, National Taiwan University)
Public discourse on Asian parenting tends to fixate on ethnic culture as a static value set, disguising the fluidity and diversity of Chinese parenting. Such stereotypes also fail to account for the challenges of raising children in a rapidly modernizing world, full of globalizing values. Dr. Lan’s new book Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018) examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration. This book draws on a uniquely comparative, multi-sited research model with four groups of parents: middle-class and working-class parents in Taiwan, and middle-class and working-class Chinese immigrants in the Boston area. Despite sharing a similar ethnic cultural background, these parents develop class-specific, context-sensitive strategies for arranging their children’s education, care, and discipline, and coping with uncertainties provoked by their changing surroundings.
About the speaker: Dr. Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Associate Dean of College of Social Sciences, and Director of Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University. She was a Harvard Yenching-Radcliffe fellow, Fulbright scholar at New York University, and postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. Her first book Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006) won several awards, including American Sociological Association Sex and Gender Book Award and ICAS Best Social Science Book Award.
