Aihwa Ong

"Knowledge Nomads:  Pied-a-terre Subjects in Emerging Asian Cities"

Tuesday, October 9, 2007 
Room  H 1-200 Time: 12:30 -- 2:00 pm

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Speaker: Aihwa Ong, is a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1982).  She joined UC Berkeley in 1984 and is currently Head of the Socio-cultural House in the Department of Anthropology. Her work has always dealt with the particular entanglements of politics, technology, and culture in rapidly changing situations on the Asia Pacific rim. Her writings on Muslim factory women, diasporic Chinese, graduated sovereignty and Cambodian refugees have helped configured an anthropology of globalization. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (1987), Flexible Citizenship (1999), and Buddha is Hiding (2003) are now classic texts in the field.   In Global Assemblages (2005), Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong proposed an anthropological approach that investigates how global and situated elements interact to shape conditions of contemporary living.

Currently, her work focuses on regimes of governing, technology, and culture that crystallize new meanings and practices of the human.  These ideas are explored in Neoliberalism as Exception (2006), and Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (2007). Her field research shifts between sites in Southeast Asia and China in order to track emerging global centers and biotechnical experiments in East Asian modernity.

Her writings have been translated into German, Italian, and Chinese. Some projects were supported by the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She has spoken at many universities and conferences in Asia and Europe, including the World Economic Forum at Davos. 
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The flight of skilled Asian migrants to liberal democracies has overshadowed the equally significant influx of Western-educated experts to Asian economies. A curious symbiosis between knowledge nomads and globalizing Asian centers, I argue, is destabilizing notions of citizenship in the Asia-Pacific region.

Contrary to claims that big cities are denationalized sites of human rights, the globalizing city in Asia is a resolutely national space that favors the rights of skilled migrants. Expatriates add to and reflect the economic and symbolic values of ambitious Asian cities.  But the limited commitments of global professionals, symbolized by their pied-a-terre status, mutate the norms of citizenship in these interstitial spaces. Are pied-a-terre subjects the necessary hinge between a global meritocracy and the new Asian megacity?  If the knowledge nomad embodies the denationalized character of capitalism itself, what are the effects of pied-a-terre subjects on citizenship in the host society?

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