Branded belonging: Shoe culture and identity negotiation among rural migrant children in urban Chinese schools

Abstract

Based on child-centered ethnographic fieldwork at a public middle school in Qingdao, the study investigates how consumerism reshapes identity formation among rural migrant children, foregrounding the symbolic power of branded footwear in everyday peer culture. Through in-depth observation and interviews, the research identifies three primary strategies through which migrant children navigate the symbolic boundaries of urban belonging: consumer imitation, meritocratic alignment, and strategic withdrawal. Rather than treating identity as an outcome of Hukou-based institutional exclusion alone, the study conceptualizes it as a situated, embodied process shaped by material consumption, peer comparison, and affective regulation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital and Goffman’s framework of performative identity, the findings demonstrate how consumerism functions as a mechanism of symbolic violence disciplining migrant children’s desires, behaviors, and self-perceptions. The paper proposes “consumption capital” as a new axis of inequality, wherein social legitimacy is increasingly tied to market-mediated symbols. By tracing the lived negotiations of marginalized children, the study offers a critical lens on how classed identities are reproduced and resisted under late consumer capitalism in contemporary China.