Literary Festival 2016: BBC: British Born Chinese

Spring 2016 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Dr Elena Barabantseva, Anna Chen, Andy Lawrence, Dr Véronique Pin-Fat | British Born Chinese engages the everyday struggles of two boys, Dan (aged between 11-13) and Kevin (aged between 12-14), reconciling their Britishness with Chineseness through their experiences at school, as volunteers at a community centre, and at home. Filmed over the course of two years in an innovative participatory and reflexive style, this film is an example of how artistic practices of filmmaking can work as a primary research tool. Driven by dialogue and close involvement with the film’s subjects, the film challenges the dominant popular representations of British Chinese as a ‘model minority’, and argues for a different understanding of community based on a shared sense of vulnerability. Elena Barabantseva is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester and Co-Producer of British Born Chinese. She is a member of the Critical Global Politics research cluster, and British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) and author of Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism: De-Centering China. Andy Lawrence is filmmaker in residence and lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. He is the founder of AllRitesReversed, a documentary film production company. He is Co-Producer of British Born Chinese. Anna Chen (@MadamMiaow) writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio 4 as a freelance, and writes, produces and presents her arts show, Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge, at Resonance 104.4FM. Her blog, Madam Miaow Says, was shortlisted in the 2010 Orwell Prize for blogs, and long listed in 2012. Véronique Pin-Fat publishes on ethics in global politics and is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. William Callahan is Professor of International Relations at LSE. His toilet adventures (2015) film was shortlisted for a major award by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. The International Relations Department (@LSEIRDept) at LSE is now in its 87th year, making it one of the oldest as well as largest in the world.