Lisa Richaud (Université libre de Bruxelles)

Rural-to-urban migrants have largely been portrayed as future-oriented, striving subjects, living “in suspension” and enduring precarious conditions for the sake of desired futures. This talk works from the premise that such depictions tend to naturalize purposefulness as a constant mode of being requiring no efforts to be sustained against other temporal and affective (dis)orientations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2017-2018, the talk zeroes in on the lives of young migrant café workers in Shanghai who turned to the cosmopolitan service sector in pursuit of self-development and entrepreneurial futures.