Date & Time: 2:45 – 5:15 PM, Monday Sept 21

Location: LIB 1113

Speaker: Yukun Zeng, Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Ever wondered what you could actually do with an anthropology or social science degree besides go to grad school? Dr. Zeng has spent years building a career around exactly that question. He’s worked as an ethnographic journalist, writing about real social issues for public audiences instead of just academic journals. He runs public forums when something urgent happens in society, so people affected by it get to be part of the conversation, not just the subject of it. He co- runs Tyingknots (结绳志), a public WeChat account that translates research into writing everyday people actually want to read. This talk walks through seven concrete “crafts” he’s picked up along the way, including practical skills like interviewing, public writing, and running community discussions, and makes the case that these are real, buildable skills, not just things you either have a talent for or don’t. If you’ve ever wondered how to turn research or writing skills into something people outside a classroom actually value, this is a good place to start.

Bio

Yukun Zeng (曾毓坤) is currently a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He conducts ethnographic research on education, labor, language, morality, grassroots movements, state sociocultural engineering, and the social lives and political economy of “Chinese thought” in the global contexts. He is now completing his book manuscript Radical Wisdom: Reading Classics and Staking Morality in Contemporary Chinese Confucianism, and conducting research on the new project of migrant workers’ self-study examination He also engages in a variety of public anthropology projects, including the platform Tyingknots.