Mental Health, Migration and the Chinese Mega-City, 2016-2019

The data has been generated by ethnographic observations, interviews and interactions with migrant workers in two sites in Shanghai in 2017/2018: Songjiang District on the south-western outskirts, and the inner-city Huangpu District, in proximity to some of the city’s most famous tourist attractions, such as the Bund or Nanjing Road. Ethnography, with its focus on everyday experience, can yield significant insights into understanding migrant mental health in contexts where signs of severe mental distress remain largely imperceptible, and more generally, into how stresses and strains are lived through the spaces, times and affective atmospheres of the city. Migrant ethnography can help us reconsider the oft-made connection between everyday stress and mental ill health. In this research, drawing on field evidence in central and peripheral Shanghai, we highlight the importance of attending to the forms of spatial and temporal agency through which migrants actively manage the ways in which the city affects their subjectivity. These everyday subjective practices serve to problematize the very concept of ‘mental health’, enabling us to engage in a critical dialogue with sociological and epidemiological research that assesses migrant mental health states through the lens of the vulnerability or resilience of this social group, often reducing citiness to a series of environmental ‘stressors’.