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Drum Village Primary School

Vickie Zhang






Like many rural schools across China, Drum Village Primary School’s days feel numbered. Children’s education is being transformed as China’s 650 million villagers increasingly aspire to urban life and schooling. As a result, and despite persistent reforms in rural education, the village schools that have historically raised China’s rural youth are being hollowed out. Set in this seemingly imminent crisis, this short film offers slow vignettes of a winter’s day at a shrinking school on China’s Loess Plateau.


Vickie Zhang is a cultural geographer who recently completed her PhD in the School of Geography, The University of Melbourne. Situated across cultural and economic geography, her research brings theories of affect and embodiment in cultural geography to bear on empirical studies of working life, with a particular focus on China and Australia. Her PhD research studied the experiences of workers affected by coalmine closures in regional Australia and China, exploring the embodied transitions for workers and their families after workplace closure and loss.

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