Passing Through Shanghai examines how children experience international mobility. Focusing on a
specific yet diverse group of expatriate youths in contemporary Shanghai the book investigates
how children negotiate cultural identity when they are subject to the highly mobile and often
privileged lifestyle associated with their parent's international careers. The ethnographic
fieldwork that informs the book was carried out in Shanghai from 2010 to 2012 and focused on
expatriate teenagers' everyday practices their lives at international schools their
engagement with the city their dreams and aspirations as well as their questions of
belonging. The book's ethnographic approach captures the in-between state of moving while
growing up and explores teenage practices and positionings in this transitory situation. The
teenagers' own perspectives and experiences of living in expatriate communities contribute to a
larger view of the interdependence and contradictions between the aspired flexibility of
twenty-first century identities and the rigidity of cultural divisions based on nationality
ethnicity gender and class.
