By Anja Kanngieser and Manuela Zechner

On 8th July 2010 a conversation with Chen Hangfeng and Chris Connery, hosted by Manuela Zechner and Anja Kanngieser, took place in Shanghai, looking into the present from the point of view of a desirable future.

Would this have appeared in Tesla's vision of the future at the 1893 Worlds Fair?

Thanks to contributions from Dan Hassan, Ned Rossiter and Brett Neilson

The event Rethinking Regionalism from the View of Social Mobilities was organised as an occasion to re-imagine and discuss the configuration of regional formations and borders, particularly Asia and China, through the lens of social and cultural movements and transmutations. This required a shift away from discourses oriented around the nation-state, in order to evoke the constitutive interplay of subjectivities, governance and geopolitical assemblages through which regions and border zones are produced and enforced. The event facilitated three interlocking segments: two visits to labour sites in which these interplays are being articulated, and a final symposium at which these considerations could be reflected upon in light of the participant’s own contexts and research. What follows are some of our thoughts and impressions of those site visits.

Self Valorisation, Social Mobilities and Creative Labour: Challenges to Methods and Vocabularies

Over the past several years, great efforts have been made to integrate invention, innovation and creativity into the core of China’s economy. This has witnessed not only shifts in manufacturing and production technologies, but also in forms of labour organisation. In Shanghai specifically, a mass workforce has begun to aggregate in the creative and cultural labour sectors, including the arts, design, fashion, advertising and also software development, IT, logistics and services. As in Europe, this burgeoning workforce is one predominantly typified by a relatively low labour to wage ratio, high contact hours, flexible contracts and spatial fragmentation. It is also one deeply invested in aspirationalism.