“Whose face doesn’t have a color?”
This was the question Tao Zhang asked her professor the first time she encountered the term “people of color” in a doctoral course. She had just arrived in the United States from China. The concept of race was entirely new to her. “I didn’t even know what race meant,” she recalls.
But that moment has inspired her to explore marginalized identity experiences implied in one’s constructed “race” in transnational contexts. She is now Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication and Language at Duke Kunshan University. Recently, she published her article “Seeking the ‘us’ in our othernesses: Decolonizing the understanding of Chinese-ness(es) through lenses of transnationalism and thick(er) intersectionalities” in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. The article reflects this focus by challenging the dominant U.S. White/non-White racial binary. Read More
How does studying in a Sino-foreign university shape the way Chinese students learn, think, and understand themselves? Supported by a CSCC Student-Initiated Research and Creative Inquiry Grant awarded in Spring 2026, Quantitative Political Economy student Tianyi Xie (Class of 2028) presented the interim findings of her research exploring this question at the International Symposium on Foreign Language Education and Cultural Communication from the Perspective of the Global South, hosted by Tongji University in Shanghai on July 10–11, 2026.
Students enter new educational environments with ways of thinking, learning, and participating shaped by the educational and cultural environments where they grew up. For example, Chinese students entering Sino-Foreign Joint Venture Universities may find that ways of learning developed in the Chinese high-school system gradually change as they participate in English-based courses. Tianyi’s research explores how students’ habits, practices, and identities continue to evolve through both the university environment and their own reflections on their experiences. Read More
Give to the CSCC
Address: No. 8 Duke Avenue, Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China 215316
Phone Number: +86 512 36657053
Email: dku-cscc@dukekunshan.edu.cn