Dr. Orna Naftali

Orna Naftali is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies. Her research focuses on childhood, youth, and education; gender and the family; science and subjectivity; national identity, militarism, and the nation-state in modern and contemporary China.
Dr. Naftali obtained a BA in East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; an MA in Culture Research at Tel Aviv University; and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published extensively on issues such as the globalization of Chinese education; nationalism and militarism in PRC schools and popular culture; the emergence of new conceptualizations of privacy and subjectivity in China; the rise of child psychology in contemporary urban China; and the development of a new Chinese discourse on children's rights and children's citizenship, a topic which was also the focus of her first book, Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Dr. Naftali's second book, Children in China (China Today series, Polity Press, 2016), provides an extensive overview of the momentous changes that have taken place in the lives of both rural and urban Chinese children since the launch of economic reforms in 1978. Covering schooling, consumption, identity formation processes, family and peer relations among other aspects of children’s lives, the book explores the rise of new ideas of child-care, child-vulnerability and child-agency; the impact of the One-Child Policy; and the emergence of Chinese children as independent consumers in the new market economy.
Her current research explores the interface between education, militarization, national identity, and new class formations in China. A recently completed project, "Education and the Formation of National Identity in China: The Effects of Schooling and ‘Patriotic Education’ on Youth of Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds” (sponsored by the ISF and the Harry S. Truman Research Insitute for the Advancement of Peace, 2012-2016), examined the effects of schooling, the Chinese government's 'patriotic education' campaign, and consumption of foreign popular culture products on the attitudes of urban and rural Han-Chinese youths of various class backgrounds toward their nation-state and foreign 'Others'.
Dr. Naftali is currently engaged in a new ethnographic project on War and the Military in Contemporary Chinese Education: The Effects of Schooling and the 'Patriotic Education' Campaign on the Attitudes of Middle-School Students toward Armed Conflict (supported by a Spencer Foundation Small Grant, 2016-2019). In addition, she is working on a historical study on constructions of gender, war, and political violence in PRC children and youth culture and education (1949-present).

Dr. Naftali welcomes enquiries from prospective MA and doctoral students interested in topics including:
Anthropology of contemporary China
Children, childhood and youth in the PRC (1949 to present)
Schooling and education in the PRC (1949 to present)
Anthropology of gender and the family in the PRC (1949 to present)
Popular nationalism in contemporary China
State-society relations in contemporary China

Recent Publications

2018. “'These War Dramas are like Cartoons': Education, Media Consumption, and Chinese Youth Attitudes towards Japan.” Journal of Contemporary China, 1-16. Publisher's Version Abstract

The growing prevalence of foreign media consumption, including from Japan, among young Chinese has received considerable notice in recent work on PRC youth culture. To date however, few studies have considered how youth of different social backgrounds perceive their consumption of Japanese popular culture in the context of the Party-state's 'patriotic education' campaign waged in schools and in the mass media since the 1990s. Studies have also overlooked the question of how rural and urban youth in China currently juxtapose the images and themes conveyed in the Japanese popular culture that they consume with school and domestic media messages about Japan. Drawing on interviews among senior middle school students in China, the present study addresses this issue. It finds that a majority of youth of different backgrounds profess animosity towards Japan, but readily separate these feelings from their passion for Japanese media. In some cases, consumption of Japanese popular culture allows youth to feel that they 'know' - or even appreciate - the other country better. Amid the anti-Japanese messages youth currently receive at school and through domestic media, consumption of Japanese popular culture products therefore manifests a form of 'expressive individualism' on the part of some Chinese youth, who creatively construct their own notions of patriotism, national memory, and Sino-Japanese relations.

2016. Children in China. Cambridge: Polity Press, 192. Publisher's Version Abstract

This book explores the dramatic transformation of Chinese childhood in the post-socialist era. It examines how government policies introduced in China over the last few decades and processes of social and economic change are reshaping the lives of individual children and the conceptions of Chinese childhood in complex, contradictory ways. Drawing on a broad range of literature and original ethnographic research, Naftali discusses the rise of new ideas of child-care, child-vulnerability and child-agency; the impact of the One-Child Policy; and the emergence of children as independent consumers in the new market economy. She shows that Chinese boys and increasingly girls too are enjoying a new empowerment, a development that has met with ambiguity from both caregivers and the state. She also demonstrates how economic restructuring and the recent waves of rural/urban migration have produced starkly unequal conditions for children's education and development both in the countryside and in the cities. Children in China is essential reading for students and scholars seeking a deeper understanding of what it means to be a child in contemporary China, as well as for those concerned with the changing relationship between children, the state and the family in the global era.

Naftali, Orna. 2014. “The Work of Rights Lawyers in the PRC: Hopeless Endeavor or Important Contribution to the Construction of a Chinese Civil Society?.” Ma’asei-Mishpat 6: 97-104.

Recent Presentations

"'Don’t Get Soft!': Military-Style Methods in Children’s Care and Education in China", at The Fourteenth Biennial Conference of Asian Studies in Israel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Wednesday, May 23, 2018

ASI18 Website

"Celebrating Conflict? War Narratives in Chinese Schools of the Maoist Period (1949-76), at Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Quebec, Canada November 2-5, 2017 , Friday, November 3, 2017

"Middle-Class Cosmopolitanism in Shanghai: Education, Ethics, and the Pursuit of Cultural Capital", at The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University , Thursday, June 23, 2016

Middle Classes in East Asia's Global Cities: Spaces, Communities, and Lifestyles, International Workshop, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 21-23 June 2016

Dr. Orna Naftali

Chair, Department of Asian Studies

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