| Taking a communication perspective, this dissertation examines the socio-cultural phenomenon of how people imagine and build their home. It addresses one central question:In today’s urban China, how do individuals who display or aspire to possess a middle-class lifestyle build and manage their home? The reality context of this dissertation is contemporary Shanghai, where in the stride toward a "global city", urban development and commercialization of residential homes are reconfiguring the city spatially. Formed around the consumption of residential homes is the emergence of an urban middle-class lifestyle that is both defining and displaying an urban middle class in formation. This is a social collective with large degrees of internal heterogeneity; but it is being formed as its members and those city residents who aspire to become its members build their homes in the city. They draw from historical, media, and real estate developers’ promotional materials as resources of their imagination, and turn their home into not only an embodied text of their class belonging but also a site of their everyday uses of the media. This process involves not only selecting a district of the city, a residence community of a particular orientation, and the interior spatial layout of a particular style, but also employing particular ways of using the media that also serve to configure and draw boundaries of one’s home.For this purpose, I deployed theoretical materials from cultural sociology, cultural geography, and studies of urban culture. I also adopted both field studies (both participant observations and in-depth interviews) and textual analysis methods. With these means, I collected and analyzed three types of empirical materials:(1) records of in-depth interviews of65individuals residing in different urban districts in Shanghai;(2) field observation records of my observations of the spatial configuration and uses of their homes; and (3) texts of media representations and real estate developers’promotional materials.Built upon the analysis of these materials, this dissertation advances the following four propositions about contemporary Shanghai. First, people’s imagination and pursuit of the middle-class lifestyle articulate with the prevalent discourse that is sustained by the market logic. Such a discourse is formed via selecting from Shanghai’s past glory in the1920s and1930s and from the advanced western countries those elements that are imagined as indications of advances, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. Second, operating in the frame of the neo-liberalist ideology, the prevalent discourse depicts the middle class as the mainstream of the Chinese society. By doing so, it equates the two and in effect universalizes the middle-class lifestyle. The promulgation of the "authenticity" of a city and urban life in it reflects the very tendency of naturalizing and materializing such an ideology. Third, in such a structural nexus, individuals cannot escape from being participants in the routinization of such an ideological process in everyday life. They integrate and utilize the afore-mentioned discursive resources to construct their home through what may be called a "dialogical imagination." In other words, they realize their class belonging and distinction by constructing and managing their home space. Their expressions of how they realize their home not only reveal their values for safety, privacy, order, distinction, individuality, and cosmopolitanism, but also expose their anxiety over an unsettling social position. Fourth, ingrained in the middle-class lifestyle that gets physically embodied in the home space is a particular type of gender-role relationships in domestic settings. Such home space also operates as a site of double-mediation, namely, while the mediating functions of the media take place in the place of home, as a site of media use, home also mediates the mediating functions of the media.In sum, this dissertation, taking Shanghai as a case, examines a social collective that, despite its internal heterogeneity, comes across as China’s urban middle class. It depicts the socio-cultural phenomenon of them pursuing what they imagine to be the middle-class lifestyle, and explores how "living in one’s own home" takes place as an ideological process, a process of class formation, and a process of representation, embodiment, and articulation of the market promulgated ideology.This dissertation deploys theoretical resources from different academic disciplines. It analyzes not only media texts about housing, home, and lifestyle, but also how such media representations, through individuals’practices of finding and building their home, not only get utilized in but also mediate the process of realizing home. Reflecting this feature, this dissertation asks questions in a way that is more akin to that of cultural sociology and urban anthropology. By doing so, it also attempts to bring to the forefront of communication discipline the subject matters (e.g., mundane everyday life, the ideas of home and the practices of building one’s home, the placements of the media in the site of one’s everyday life, etc.) that tend to be neglected by communication researchers operating in either "the transmission view" or "the ritual view." The limitations of the dissertation lie in the empirical portion, including a narrow range of individuals interviewed and a relatively thin layer of field observations of people’s everyday life.
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