School of Social and Political Science

Dr Grace H. Zhou

Job Title

Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Photo
A Chinese-American woman in a red jacket standing in front of a wall of orange clock-vine
Personal website
www.gracehzhou.com

Research interests

Research interests

My research and writing explore transnational intimacies, care and precarity in late capitalist and postsocialist contexts, and the mobility of settler colonial formations.

My work also engages with (ethnographic) poetry and multimodal methods.

My research is grounded in Central Asia, and I have interests in working on (global) China, the American west, and Ireland.

Background

I am a poet and anthropologist with a PhD from Stanford University. 

My ongoing projects explore how gendered and racialized regimes of labor and care sustain formations of inequality and power across Central Asia. My first book manuscript, Parasitic Intimacies: Life, Love, and Labor in the Asian Borderlands, weaves together the lifeworlds of diverse groups in Kyrgyzstan that were once criminalized as unproductive “social parasites”—migrant sex workers, drug addicts, and entrepreneurial traders with transnational networks that reach into China, Turkey, and beyond. By tracking their intimate labor across borders, my book brings together economic and medical discourses to show that gendered and devalued “parasitic” dependencies are, in fact, forms of generative relational work that shape local imaginaries of care and well-being, as well as transnational flows of people, goods, and wealth. It looks to the feminized and racialized figure of the parasite as an otherwise politics for marginalized groups, presenting an ethics that embraces not only mutuality, but dependency.

Another prong of my research seeks to deepen my theorization of “settler socialism,” a term I use to refer to the way that labor and forced migration facilitated differential forms of incorporation and access for indigenous and settler populations in (post-)Soviet Central Asia. I am co-covening a collaborative, interdisciplinary research group that explores this topic across both Soviet and Chinese Central Asia.

My next ethnographic project, Fishing in the Desert: Care and Ecological Diplomacy in the Aral Basin, expands my engagement in the imbrications of care and power at the confluence of different regimes in Central Asia, by bringing it into conversation with studies of science and technology, environment and ecology. This project attends to the conjunction of environmental crisis, economic decline, and public health catastrophe in the desiccated Aral Sea basin. 

As a poet, I have a long-standing interest in multi-genre and multi-modal ethnography. My poetry chapbook, Soil Called a Country, which reimagines the settler colonial legacies of the American West through a speculative recasting of archival, familial, and personal narratives of the Chinese diaspora, was selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series by the non-profit press Newfound. I am working on a full-length manuscript titled diasporous

My research and writing have been supported by the National Science Foundation (USA), Social Science Research Council (USA), Taighde Éireann-Research Ireland, Arts Council of Ireland, Institute for Citizens and Scholars, as well as the Humanities Center, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, I was a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University and a President's Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University.

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Poetry chapbook cover titled "Soil Called a Country" from Newfound press

Soil Called a Country, Newfound's 2023 Emerging Poets Series

(Im)mobile Intimacies: Commodities and Marriage at the Crossroads of Asia,” in Feminist Anthropology. 

Life and Death in the Margins: Addiction, Dispossession, and Care in Kyrgyzstan,” in The Central Asian World, Routledge

Un/tracing Empire: Pollinations between the Poetic and Ethnographic” and “Erasure as Repair: A Speculative Poetics of the Archive,” in Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology

Epistemology as Ethics: Notes from the Asian Borderlands,” in Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology

 

Works within

Grace Zhou's Research Explorer profile