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ESRC/Research Council Hong Kong Collaborative Research
ESRC collaborative Hong Kong Research Council Grant research project
Professor Stevi Jackson and Dr Sik-ying Ho (University of Hong Kong) have gained joint funding from the ESRC (grant number 000-22-3628) and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council for a collaborative research project.
New Collaborative Research Project
This study is concerned with the consequences of recent rapid social change for women’s lives in East Asia (primarily Hong Kong) and the west (primarily the UK) and how women themselves make sense of these transformations. Within sociology these changes have been associated with increasing individualization and the instability of intimate relationships, but also with more equal, flexible and democratic relationships between women and men and within families. Such propositions have been much debated amongst feminists, but these debates have largely focused on western societies, ignoring the modern societies of East Asia (such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and S. Korea).
This study seeks to remedy this by exploring and comparing the impact of social change on gender relations in a western and eastern location. We will take account of apparent global changes associated with modernization, such as the increasing participation of women in the labour market and women delaying or eschewing marriage and childbearing, but will also explore social and cultural differences. We will ask how differing histories, traditions and patterns of daily life affect the ways in which modern social change is experienced and understood.
We will begin with review of the literature, considering how East Asian and Western sociologists have analysed modernity and what we can learn from taking account of both eastern and western perspectives. We will then conduct a small comparative empirical study focusing on the ways in which women perceive the changes through which they are living.
Since there have been some significant recent changes within a generation – and particularly rapid change in East Asian societies such as Hong Kong – we will conduct life-history interviews with pairs of mothers and daughters in both the UK and Hong Kong, investigating how they see the changes that have occurred in the lives of themselves and each other.
We will also consider how, through the life stories they tell us, they construct a sense of self and the extent to which this is congruent with the individualized selfhood posited by theories of late modernity. In so doing we aim to contribute to debates on gender, modernity and individualization and to developing a more rounded picture of modernity in its varied forms.