Description
Women’s Wellbeing, Care and Digital Culture in a Changing China: Everyday Negotiations of Social Transformation
This panel examines how women in contemporary China experience, interpret and participate in social change through everyday practices of care, family life, beauty, intimacy, digital media and cultural participation. Responding to the conference theme of “conflict and cooperation in a changing world,” the panel understands conflict not primarily as confrontation, but as the everyday negotiation of different expectations: personal aspiration, family responsibility, social recognition, health and wellbeing, digital participation and community belonging. Cooperation, similarly, is approached as a practical and relational process through which women create meaning, maintain relationships, support one another and adapt to changing social environments.
Bringing together five papers on postnatal care, beauty practices, heterosexual intimacy, influencer culture and fan communities, the panel explores how women’s lived experiences illuminate broader transformations in contemporary Chinese society. The papers show that women are not merely shaped by social expectations; they also actively interpret, adjust and reshape these expectations through embodied practices, emotional labour, consumption, peer evaluation, family negotiation and online participation.
The panel contributes to China Studies, feminist sociology, media and cultural studies, and international studies by foregrounding women’s everyday lives as important sites for understanding social transformation. Its social significance lies in taking women’s experiences seriously as sources of knowledge about wellbeing, family relations, cultural participation and gender equality. Rather than presenting social change only through institutions or formal politics, the panel highlights how change is lived and negotiated in bodies, homes, relationships and digital communities.
Panel Convener: Dr Hua Ma, Stirling College, Chengdu University
Email: ma.hua@stir.ac.uk
Chair: Dr Chalisa Chintrakarn, University of Birmingham
Email: c.chintrakarn.1@bham.ac.uk
Chair bio: Dr Chalisa Chintrakarn is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, where she was awarded a PhD in Sociology. Her academic curiosity relates to gender and media studies, consumer culture, inequalities, and social policy.
Discussant: None