简介

My research focuses on rural social transformation, ethnic identity, modernity and modernization processes, tourism and migration, and documentary media practices. I work primarily in the People's Republic of China. I am Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. From July to December 2015, I am on sabbatical as a Visiting Assistant Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. Beginning in January 2016, I will be serving as Co-Editor of Visual Anthropology Review, the journal of the Society for Visual Anthropology. I earned my PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at UC Berkeley in 2009. My first book explores the consequences of tourism development in two rural ethnic minority villages in China, titled A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China (published by the University of Washington Press in the series "Studies on Ethnic Groups in China"). More information on all of my published work is available on the PUBLICATIONS page. I am also an ethnographic filmmaker. I directed and produced a film about ethnic tourism in the villages I study (农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, 2013). The film is distributed for educational, institutional, and other non-profit public viewing by Berkeley Media, LLC. For details on how to purchase the film for personal viewing, visit the FILMS page. In 2003, I received my MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. My thesis was a digital video on the visual representation of ethnic minorities in China, titled Film the People. From 2009-2012, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, where I began developing my current research project on amateur media, ethnic identity, modernity, and social transformation in rural China. This new research project examines the lived experience of modernity in China's countryside through an ethnographic exploration of the production and consumption of locally made amateur and semi-professional documentary videos. Documentary recordings of this kind are ubiquitous across much of rural ethnic China, especially, and many rural filmmakers participate in state and international community media training programs in addition to producing videos for local markets. My research on rural media, thus far, has led me to investigate the intersections between development, media literacy, modernization processes, the politics of participation, and new imaginations of rural modernity and contemporary ethnic subjectivity in China today. In addition to my research on rural media, I am also interested in Chinese independent documentary film and film festivals. Luke Robinson and I have published an article on Yunfest 2011 in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas as well as a commentary essay in Anthropology News (2014) on censorship and Chinese independent film festivals. Between 2009-2015, I have served as an elected board member of the Society for Visual Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). I co-directed the SVA Film and Media Festival in 2013 and 2014 with Harjant Gill, and I currently sit on the festival jury. It's an amazing opportunity to see the innovative range of ethnographic media that is being produced around the world and to help bring some well-deserved attention to this field of scholarship and inquiry.