In China, recent events related to gender have exploded across digital and mass media. These events address long-standing concerns related to public health, violence, marriage, sex, sexuality, and fertility. Meanwhile, academic scholarship that follow these developments have centered on the topics of gender and housework, mass media, childcare and fertility, generation and aging, public health (including mental health), as well as affect and subjectivity, as means of theorizing and making sense of, gender from interdisciplinary perspectives. These contributions on gender – as practices of labor, gifting, exchange, love, governance, self-management, and personhood – highlight the necessity of attending to the potentialities and possibilities of gender as analytical frameworks that may help us to re-imagine our relationships with nature and non-human kin; to redefine our meanings of family, labor, gender, identity, family relations, and community; and to redraw the boundaries that confine us to our disciplinary, national, and gendered forms of inclusion and belonging.
This cluster seeks to bring scholars from various disciplines to discuss gender in China from transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Our mission is to provide a platform of scholarly exchange to collaboratively brainstorm novel and intersectional perspectives on issues that affect us more urgently on global and planetary scales. By privileging gender as it relates to a globalizing China as frameworks of discussion and analyses, we hope to encourage and inspire new questions and formulations that will address the problems of climate change, public health, social justice, governance, urban and economic development.
Nellie Chu is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on global supply chains in fashion and the transnational role of migrant entrepreneurs. She has a project on West African and Korean religious communities related to the doctrine of prosperity based in Guangzhou, China. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include cultures and movements, global China studies and cultural anthropology.
Yu Wang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on the role of intermarriage and individual achievement as pathways to social mobility in China during a period of rapid economic, social and demographic change. Her current project is about the interaction between demographic changes and assortative mating in contemporary China. Her articles have appeared in journals including Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, American Journal of Public Health, and Contraception.
Mengqi Wang is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on economic anthropology and how home ownership and property relations implicate and structure state power, capitalism and everyday life in post-socialist China, as well as among overseas Chinese. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include cultures and movements, global China studies, urban studies and cultural anthropology.
Andrew Wortham is an Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University. His research focuses on queer politicking in China, particularly around HIV/AIDS prevention and other public health projects. He currently has projects in Yunnan, China where he is working with Men who have Sex with Men Community Based Organizations. His teaching includes courses on the anthropology and sociology of gender and sexuality, NGOs and grassroots politics in China and medical anthropology.
Fangsheng Zhu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Fangsheng Zhu is a sociologist and studies education, particularly the interactions between families, education providers and governments. His research topics include parenting, school admissions and education policies. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include public policy, methods and education.
Hyun Jeong Ha is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include power, religion, sectarianism, and gender in the Middle East. She has written about Muslim-Christian relations in contemporary Egypt, and her current research examines how the 2011 Egyptian Arab Uprisings have affected the sectarian relations from an intersectional approach, or the consideration of class, gender, and geography. Trained as an ethnographer, she has conducted field research in Cairo, Egypt, from 2006. Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Changes, and Contexts, among others. She teaches courses on sociological theories, social problems, and religion and politics in the Middle East.
Keping Wu is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focus is the intersection among religion, gender, urbanization, public good, ethnicity, and charisma. She is especially interested in how people cross religious, ethnic, rural-urban and other boundaries. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include ethnography of China, ethnicity and diversity, and urbanization and changing religious landscapes.
She is the editor (with Robert Weller) of "It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth" (Berghahn 2019) and the co-author (with Robert Weller, C. Julia Huang-Lemmon and Lizhu Fan 2019) of "Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies" (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has had papers published in leading academic journals including Current Anthropology, Modern China and Journal of Asian Studies. She has been a member of the American Anthropological Association and Association of Asian Studies since 2006.
Wu has a B.A. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she taught at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Sun Yat-sen University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Megan Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on religion in contemporary China, and she has a particular interest in the intersection of religion and social inequality. She has conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork in China, including as a Fulbright fellow in Suzhou in 2015 and 2016). Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include sociology, culture and movements, religion, and China studies.
Rogers has bachelor's degrees in international studies and Chinese from the University of Mississippi, an M.A. in Chinese from the Ohio State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Global Religion Research Initiative, University of Notre Dame.
Robin Rodd is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. His current research is at the interface of critical theory, Latin American studies and anthropology. His work explores political memory and the symbolic bases of citizenship, democracy and dictatorship in Latin America. He has also done long-term fieldwork in lowland Amazonia focusing on indigenous notions of mind, knowledge, and health. At Duke Kunshan, his teaching interests span medical and political anthropology, Latin American cultures and politics, migration and citizenship studies, and critical theory.
Sajida Tuxun is a Lecturer of Cultural Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University. Tuxun’s research covers topics of food and globalization, gender and ethnicity, migration and mobility, with a particular focus on urban China. Through the lens of food anthropology, her research delves into the intersection of food, ethics and consumerism in the context of urbanization and globalization. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan encompass cultural anthropology, global China studies, food and globalization, migration and ethics.
Yixin Gu is a sophomore student, intending to major in cultures and movements. Her research interests encompass religion, gender, media, and intangible cultural heritage in contemporary China. She is still on the way exploring topics such as gender and care.
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