Navigating the Urban-Rural Divide: The Agency of Rural Chinese Female Higher Education Students in China

This dissertation explores how rural Chinese female students at urban Chinese higher education institutions conceptualize and negotiate the urban-rural divide that often interplays with gender and the discourse of quality (suzhi) to shape their lives. A substantial body of literature discusses the profound inequalities that rural Chinese people encounter due to the urban-rural divide and household registration system (Chan & Zhang, 1999; Wang & Zuo, 1999; Loong-Yu & Shan, 2007; Tang & Yang, 2008; Whyte, 2010; Han, 2010). An increasing amount of literature also addresses the experiences of rural Chinese migrant women working in urban China (Gaetano & Jacka, 2004; Jacka, 2006; Gaetano, 2004; Gaetano, 2005; Yan, 2008). However, little research has been done on rural Chinese university women. The few articles that do exist tend to blame them or their culture for their failure or struggles (Ren, 2008; Xu, 2007; Wan, 2007), or else focus on the unequal power structures that victimize them (Yu, 2006); but none of these studies incorporates the perspectives of these women. My dissertation fills the scholarly gap by focusing on the voices and perspectives of a group of rural female higher education students who talked about their experiences of negotiating multiple and intersecting power structures. Qualitative methodology and feminist methodology informed this dissertation. To collect data, I conducted open-ended, in-depth interviews with 66 rural female students (51 undergraduates and 15 graduate students) at five public universities and one public college in northern China. This research revealed the profound inequalities that these students experienced in attaining higher education, such as urban primary and secondary schools’ exclusion of rural students, overt and subtle forms of gender discrimination at home and school, regional discrimination reflected in higher education admission policies, and political control and punishment through the National Higher Education Entrance Examination. These had seldom been examined by previous studies. The students that I interviewed also encountered numerous obstacles to their integration into urban campuses; they felt marginalized from mainstream urban life because the dominant culture regarded urban life and people as superior to rural life and people. Despite all these barriers, these women did not allow themselves to be defeated; instead they became active agents by developing strategies to negotiate and resist the barriers when they could. Building upon the work of Daniel G. Solorzano and Dolores Delgano Bernal (2001) and of Tara J. Yosso (2006), I define such agency that my participants exhibited as the ability to navigate the institutional barriers and social norms that constrain their conditions of existence. Though my participants were constrained by the unequal structures of power, they were also aware of the inequalities. They responded by making decisions and devising strategies to become upwardly mobile through educational achievements. It may seem that by striving for educational success, they were merely conforming to the societal norm; but they were also in this way resisting marginalization arising from the dominant cultural capital and the discourse of quality that represents them as inferior or deficient. In response to the discourse of quality, they also exercised their agency by making meaning of their lived experiences with this discourse and/or developing counter-discourses to negotiate it. Furthermore, when they encountered different and sometimes contradictory forms of patriarchy across rural and urban contexts, they expressed their agency by shifting and reformulating their identities

Counter-Discourses and Alternative Knowledge: Rural Chinese Female Students Accommodating and Resisting the Discourse of Quality (Suzhi) at Higher Education Institutions in China

This article, based on a qualitative research study with 66 rural female students attending five public universities and one public college in China, examines how these students negotiated the dominant discourse of quality (suzhi), which represents them as lacking in capacity and knowledge. Since the 1980s when China started implementing its economic reforms, the Chinese state has constructed the discourse of quality to ascribe China’s underdevelopment to the low quality of its population, said to hinder China’s attempts to catch up with the more advanced Western economies. My research findings show how these students have been systematically marginalized and discriminated against by this discourse that is often intertwined with that of urban-rural inequalities and patriarchy. Recognizing this, they developed counter-discourses to make meaning of their plight, and created alternative forms of knowledge to resist the dominant discourse in multiple ways

Research on Multimedia Teaching Materials of Ergonomics Experiments

AbstractAs important foundation for product design, ergonomics studying has been necessary for most engineering students. Ergonomics experiments can help students obtain perceptual knowledge of human factors. Through research of integrating multimedia technology into ergonomics experiments teaching, the author hopes to improve the teaching effect of ergonomics experiment. By introducing some film shooting technology, the multimedia courseware can clearly present the process of ergonomics experiment and by means of adding more ergonomics related background knowledge, the multimedia courseware can provide students rich useful information for ergonomics study. The development of ergonomics multimedia courseware gives a novel idea is to improve teaching effect

Acceleration of Histogram-Based Contrast Enhancement via Selective Downsampling

In this paper, we propose a general framework to accelerate the universal histogram-based image contrast enhancement (CE) algorithms. Both spatial and gray-level selective down- sampling of digital images are adopted to decrease computational cost, while the visual quality of enhanced images is still preserved and without apparent degradation. Mapping function calibration is novelly proposed to reconstruct the pixel mapping on the gray levels missed by downsampling. As two case studies, accelerations of histogram equalization (HE) and the state-of-the-art global CE algorithm, i.e., spatial mutual information and PageRank (SMIRANK), are presented detailedly. Both quantitative and qualitative assessment results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed CE acceleration framework. In typical tests, computational efficiencies of HE and SMIRANK have been speeded up by about 3.9 and 13.5 times, respectively.Comment: accepted by IET Image Processin

A Study on the Training Mode of Electronic Application- Oriented Undergraduate with Industry Needs

Electronic industry is an economic pillar in China. Due to the Moore’s Law, the industry requires continuous development and innovation. In order to achieve these goals, the cultivation of electronic application-oriented undergraduate is essential. However, at current, the innovative educational concepts and teaching methods are lagging behind so that the graduates cannot meet the requirements of electronic industry. In this paper, we adopt a variety of measures, which include the construction of parallel course system, the establishment of cooperative education mechanics and the creation of training evaluation mode, to improve the training quality of electronic application-oriented undergraduate. The research findings show that the undergraduates improve their engineering practices and innovation abilities