Research interests: Anthropology of modern and contemporary China, with a focus on children, youth, and education; women, gender, and the family; science and subjectivity; national identity, militarism, and the nation-state; rights and legal consciousness of children and youth in China.
I completed a BA in East Asian Studies with a China emphasis (The Hebrew University); an MA in Culture Research (Tel Aviv University); and an MA and a PhD in Anthropology (University of California, Santa Barbara). Straddling the disciplines of China Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology, my work covers a range of topics relating to children, youth and education in China, including: the globalization of Chinese education; the interplay between changes in notions and practices of childrearing and education and the emergence of new conceptualizations of play, 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 the focus of my first book, Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
My second book, Children in China (2016, China Today series, Polity Press), provides an overview of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the lives of 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 children as independent consumers in the new market economy. It also demonstrates how economic restructuring and the recent waves of rural–urban migration have produced starkly unequal conditions for children’s education and welfare both in the countryside and in the cities.
My recent book, Mobilising China's One-Child Generation: Education, Nationalism and Youth Militarisation in the PRC (2024, Edinburgh University Press), draws on government, media, and educational sources and on data from ethnographic field projects conducted in 2012-2019 to trace the promotion - and contestation - of military values and techniques in Chinese education of the 2010s. It further explores the intersection between this development and the construction of nationalism, masculinities, and femininities in contemporary China.
Selected publications:
Naftali, Orna. 2024. "Schooling 'Soft-Spoken Boys' and 'Masculine Girls': Morality, Equality, and Difference in China's Gender Education." Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 26: 85-113
Naftali, Orna. 2022. "'Law Does Not Come Down from Heaven': Youth Legal Socialisation Approaches in Chinese Textbooks of the Xi Jinping Era." Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 51(2): 265–291
Naftali, Orna. 2021. "Celebrating Violence? Children, Youth, and War Education in Maoist China (1949-76)". Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 14 (2): 254-273
Naftali, Orna. 2021. "Youth Military Training in China: Learning to 'Love the Army'." Journal of Youth Studies 24 (10): 1340-1357
Teaching & Mentoring:
Teaching: At the Department of Asian Studies, I teach BA and MA courses on a range of issues related to Chinese culture and society, including: "Gender and Sexuality in the PRC"; "The State and the Family in Modern China"; "Class and Consumption in China; "The Anthropology of Contemporary Chinese Society"; “Internet and the Media in Contemporary China”; "Resistance and Protest in Contemporary China"; and "Research Methods of Modern Chinese Society and Politics".
Mentoring: I welcome inquiries from prospective MA and doctoral students interested in PRC social history and the anthropology of contemporary Chinese society, particularly in regards to children and youth; family, schooling and education; gender and sexuality; state-society relations; nationalism and militarization; children's rights and youth legal consciousness in the PRC (1949-present).