This project will explore the daily lives and educational experiences of 12-14-year olds who are based in Shanghai, China, during the two-month summer holidays. It will examine similarities and differences between and among children in urban middle-class families and migrant working-class families. The context for this project is the Xi administration’s 2021 ‘double reduction policy’, which incorporates a reduction in children’s homework and a ban on for-profit extra-curricular educational services on weekends and holidays. Coinciding with this policy is the accelerated infiltration of AI Edtech, and e-monitoring and communication technologies into homes across China, transforming families’ media ecologies. By exploring children’s experiences of their families’ holiday-time child-raising repertoires - their practices, knowledges and beliefs - in this changing context, this project will provide fresh insights into how social class affects children's lives, and into how the mundane is implicated in reproducing broader structurally produced socio-economic and educational inequalities intergenerationally.
