Jennifer Hubbert – författare

Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in over 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China’s soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China’s path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China’s shifting place in the world.Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China’s soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice.China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.

Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in more than 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China's soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China's path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China's shifting place in the world.Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China's soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice.China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.

The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China is a pioneering handbook that reframes our understanding of China's extraordinary urban transformation-a demographic shift of unprecedented scale and speed that has seen two-thirds of its population becoming urban dwellers. Moving beyond conventional narratives, editors Hoffman, Hubbert, and Liu develop an innovative conceptual approach that emphasizes distinctiveness without exceptionalism, global connections without universalism, and complex interrelationships beyond binary oppositions.Through twenty-eight meticulously researched chapters of critical literature reviews, leading scholars explore China's cities and urbanism not simply through top-down state directives but also through intricate negotiations among diverse actors, interests, and histories. Deploying the concept of "e;accompaniment,"e; the editors argue the chapters reveal how state socialism and market mechanisms, rural traditions and urban aspirations coexist in dynamic tension rather than stark opposition.From historic preservation to smart city technologies, from migrant experiences to environmental initiatives, from land use and architecture to housing and labor, this volume demonstrates how urbanization in China is simultaneously localized and worlded connected to global currents while producing distinctive outcomes. By focusing on human experiences alongside institutional arrangements, the contributors illuminate how diverse actors actively shape urban spaces through their everyday decisions, creative adaptations, and sometimes resistance.The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China is essential reading for urban studies scholars, development practitioners, policy makers, and China specialists, this volume provides both literature reviews by scholarly experts and conceptual and analytical tools applicable far beyond China's borders, contributing to global urban theory while respecting local specificity.Part One: Setting the StagePart Two: Land MattersPart Three: Configuring BelongingPart Four: The Creative and the DisruptivePart Five: Negotiating IdentitiesPart Six: Generating New Geographies