Playing with with scales of visibility: the politics of recognition of a grassroots collective in China.

In this paper, by studying a grassroots collective of rural workers in the far suburbs of Beijing, we aim at exploring how the politics of recognition and identity of a collective category – i.e. rural workers – is shaped through specific arrangements of scales of mediation. Drawing on Bleil (2005), I document how the grassroots collective built hybrid arrangements of mediation in order to produce different “spatial scales of visibility” of their actions, their claims and identities, thereby showing how the collective combines local face to face interactions and actions with more global online and offline practices. What I am interested in are not subjectivities per se but rather a whole range of organizational practices and mediation processes through which spaces of interactions, of participation and of shared emotions are shaped.
This talk is based on a combination of ethnographic observations carried out in China (mainly Beijing and Shenzhen) between 2012 and 2019, of online exchanges and observation, of popular cultural products (songs, poems, popular literature, exhibitions, etc.) and of popular archives gathered over the years.