Migrant Vendors and Public Spaces in Shanghai

Résumé du livre

This is a case study about a project designed to study the public spaces of Shanghai such as parks and sidewalks. Increasingly, social scientists are interested in these matters as they furnish information about the culture of people as well as how authority is exercised in such spaces. Even more than that, fieldwork in China is quite rare so our work offered each of us an opportunity to tell stories about the people and activities in China's emerging economy. Our work can be seen as a case study in one place of how public spaces are used. But it is also a story about how two people from very different backgrounds came together to share and collaborate on this project. Their collaboration, we believe, enriched the research discoveries as well as their interpretations. Here, we try to furnish some insights into how the research unfolded for each of us in a manner that was dependent on our skills and experiences. We believe that this report thus is informative not only about the public spaces of Shanghai but how our experiences shaped both our observations as well as our interpretations.