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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how “good futures” produced by development projects are negotiated by rural young women in southwest China. Drawing on ethnography, it shows how empowerment experiences enable girls to rework, resist, and redefine future imaginaries through everyday practices of mobility.

Paper long abstract

Development projects often produce normative imaginaries of a “good future” through education, skills training, and mobility, framing urban life, respectable work, and upward mobility as desirable goals. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2023 in southwest China, this paper examines how such “good futures” are produced through development practice and how they are negotiated, accepted, and resisted through lived experiences of empowerment.

The paper analyzes this process from two interconnected perspectives. From the NGO’s viewpoint, empowerment is mobilized to promote a particular future for rural young women, emphasizing discipline, education, delayed marriage, and sustained mobility. From the perspective of the girls themselves, experiences of dance education, urban mobility, and gendered awareness gradually enable them to evaluate and reinterpret these future trajectories.

Rather than simply accepting or rejecting developmentally envisioned futures, the girls continually rework their own future imaginaries through forms of soft resistance, including leaving the project, returning to the village, engaging in urban wage work, and prioritizing family care. These practices should not be understood as failures of empowerment, but as ongoing negotiations shaped by structural constraints, emotional attachments, and personal aspirations.

By conceptualizing the “good future” as a contested and continually reworked imaginary, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on mobility, hope, and the pursuit of a good life, highlighting the interpretive gaps between development intentions and lived experiences.