Xiaobei Chen

Biography

Xiaobei Chen was born in Guiyang in the southwestern part of China. She received her B.A. from Guizhou University, M.Phil. from the University of Hong Kong, and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta (2001-2003). She has carried out policy, archival, and ethnographic research in China and Canada. She is the author of Tending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto, 1880s-1920s (University of Toronto Press, 2005), co-author of History of the Li Minority in Hainan Province, China: The Case of Collective Production Practice (2008), and co-editor of Social Work for Women in the Chinese Context (2007). Her current SSHRC-funded project studies familial, custodial and pedagogical relations between Chinese children and white Canadians in two sets of transnational processes: 1) contemporary adoptions of Chinese children to Canada; and 2) Canadian Christian mission work in China (1880s – 1950s). The project was nominated by the SSHRC Interdisciplinary Committee for the Aurora Prize in 2005. Her present writing focuses on the trajectory of problematizations of cultural differences, conceptions about the Chinese Other, the hegemonic ideas about the criteria and modes of belonging and non-belonging in racial and cultural terms, and practices of subject-making that simultaneously constitute normative subjectivities in the Chinese children and white adults.

Research Interest

The child citizen, governance, racism, culturalism, colonialism, migration