Migration, entrepreneurship and digital connectivity: ‘Connected’ Chinese women across the Taiwan Strait

Looking at Chinese women’s rural-to-urban migration in China and cross-border marriage migration to Taiwan, in this talk, I explore the link between migration, entrepreneurship, digital worlds, and emotion. Based on ethnographic research in China and in Taiwan -participant observation and 140 interviews, I discuss how migrants’ mobility, affection, and economic action growingly take place across digital and transnational scales. Specifically, I consider the situations of economic marginalization to investigate how women develop online social and emotional networks and entrepreneurship. On hidden circuits, these ‘connected’ migrant entrepreneurs contest markets and transgress borders, drawing novel digital, commercial, and emotional geographies of globalization between China and Taiwan.