School of Social and Political Science

Background

Jiazhi Fengjiang holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (2019) from the LSE. Her ongoing book project explores the political, moral, and economic lives of ordinary people who strategized volunteering and charitable work in coping with political-economic restructurings in contemporary China. She has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southeast China and rural central China on work, ethics, mobilities, and social change. Currently, she is also working on a graphic anthropology project that explores the potential of drawing as an alternative means for anthropological knowledge production. And she is developing a new research project on Chinese transnational humanitarianism in Southeast Asia. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity as a postdoctoral researcher and at Princeton University as a Global Fung Fellow. 

Her latest publications include “Remaking the value of work: The emergence of grassroots philanthropy in China ” in American Ethnologist https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13103; “The desire to help: Vernacular humanitarian imaginaries in China” as a part of the special issue “Vernacular Humanitarianism” in Social Anthropology. Her article " 'To Be a Little More Realistic': The Ethical Labour of Suspension among Nightclub Hostesses in Southeast China" is the winner of the 20th William L. Holland Prize for the best article published in 2021 Pacific Affairs. A short interview is available at https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/announcements/current-holland-prize-winner/2021-holland-prize/.