Dr Elena Barabantseva - research

Key research interests: Chinese identity politics, the interaction between development and nationalism, borders, filmmaking for research, and post-structuralist international relations theories

My current research focuses on marriage migration and governing issues in the context of China's borders with Russia and Vietnam. I started developing this project in collaboration with colleagues in China and Taiwan as the coordinator of the AHRC-funded 'Borders of Migration' research network. This research interest also laid the foundation for a major internationally-funded collaborative project ‘Immigration and the Transformation of the Chinese Society’ (2015-2018) which I am pursuing with colleagues in Europe and China.

I am also exploring the potential of audio-visual methods as modes of research practice and output.

1. In 2014 I completed a project examining the competing histories of Manchester's Chinatown. This research was funded with a seed-corn grant from cities@manchester and resulted in the peer-reviewed article in Identities and a short video essay funded by the British Inter-University China Centre and School of Social Sciences' impact fund.
2. I have collaborated on the BICC-funded research documentary film 'British Born Chinese' with Andy Lawrence (Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology and All Rites Reversed) which was launched with the first public screening in Manchester Central Library in April 2015.  As part of this project I produced a short promotional film for Manchester Chinese Centre where we started working on the film, and co-authored a pioneerring article on the potential of filmmaking research method for research for International Relations published in the special issue of the Millennium.
3. In June 2015 I published a co-edited  special issue of Cross-Currents (with Antonia Chao and Biao Xiang) 'Governing Marriage Migrations: Perspectives from China and Vietnam' and am continuing with my research on traditional forms of marriage, competing sovereign orders, and border practices on the Sino-Vientamese border. My article exploring how the regime of binational Sino-Vietnamese border in Guangxi contributed to making the traditional ethnic marriages illegal is forthcoming in International Political Sociology in Dec 2015.
4. In June 2015 I started (as UK PI) a new international collaborative research project 'Immigration and the Transformation of the Chinese Society' (2015-2018) funded by the ESRC (REF ES/L015609/1) as part of the China-Europe 'Understanding Population Change' initiative. I will be working as part of the five-country team (UK (Manchester, Oxford), the Netherlands (Leiden), France (ESSCS School of Management), China (Beida, Fudan, and Renda), and Germany (Cologne) seeking to understand the dynamics and implications of immigration to China.