“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
Ruyi Feng is a Class of 2027 student majoring in History whose research explores how funeral customs illuminate broader transformations in modern Chinese society. As a recipient of the 2024–25 CSCC Student-Initiated Research and Creative Inquiry Project Grant, she is conducting the project titled “The Evolution of the ‘Zuo Qi’ Funeral Custom in Suzhou, China from 1912 to Present”. Through this research, she examines how political movements, social change, and urbanization have reshaped “Zuo Qi”, a traditional funeral practice in Suzhou.
Drawing on archival research and field interviews, Ruyi approaches funeral customs not simply as rituals surrounding death, but as a window into changing relationships between the state, society, and everyday life. We spoke with her about how the study of funeral practices can offer valuable insights into China’s modernization, what she has learned from historical sources and interviews, and where her research is heading next Read More
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