Associate Professor
Ph.D in Medical Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco (Jan. 2000)
joined the 91社区 Faculty in 2002.? Her research and?writing bring anthropological methods to bear on critical public health and the cultural politics of epidemics, which are key areas with practical implications for understanding power, inequality, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Her book Eating Spring Rice was the first ethnographic study on AIDS in China that drew on over a decade of research in Yunnan Province. The book combines innovative public health research with in-depth ethnography on the ways that sex workers and ethnic minorities were marked as the principle carriers of HIV, despite evidence to the contrary, in a former suzerain state called Sipsongpanna (in southern China). Her second book is a co-edited volume, Postcolonial Disorders, focusing on the nature of subjectivity, everyday modes of experience, and the social and psychological dimensions of individual lives, and the forms of subjection found in diverse places where medical anthropologists work.
Her current book project - Chasing the Dragon – follows her clinical ethnography on the management of drug users at the China’s first residential Therapeutic Community in Southwest China. The book narrates the stories of peer educators, residents and doctors who devise an alternative program to manage illegal and recreational drug users in the midst of China’s current psychology boom.
She has two new projects: 1) An oral history of medicine through the life of Dr. June Pauline Brady, and her remaining 1950’s female cohort at Cambridge University Medical School; and, 2) an ethnography of diaspora Chinese environmental activism through the lens of activists who immigrated to Canada and those who remain in China. ?
Representative Publications
Books
In-progress Chasing the Dragon: Affective Politics and the Malleable Addict, manuscript draft in preparation for Duke University Press.
2008 Postcolonial Disorders, co-edited with Mary-Jo DelVecchio-Good, Sarah Pinto and Byron Good. Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Series, Berkeley: University of California Press.
2007 Eating Spring Rice: The Cultural Politics of AIDS in Southwest China, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Select Articles and Chapters
2017 “Spending my own Money, Harming my own body: Addiction and Care in Southwest China,” for special issue of Medical Anthropology on Therapeutics, Governance and Care in Asia, March.
2011 “Migrating Heroin Therapeutics:? Turning Addicts into Patients and Patients into Healthy Citizens in Southwest China,” Body & Society Special Issue on Medical Migration, Vol. 17 (2&3): 184-204.
2011 “ Screams, Cries and Whispers: Traveling Heroin Therapeutics and Humanitarian Aid in Post-Socialist China,” in Peter Redfield and Erica Bornstein (eds.) Forces of Compassion: The Global Politics of Humanitarian Aid, SAR Advanced Seminar Series, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press and James Currey, Oxford. 153-174.
2008 “Everyday AIDS Practices: Contestations of Borders and Infectious Disease in Southwest China,” in Postcolonial Disorders, MJ.D. Good, S.T. Hyde, S. Pinto and B. Good (eds.), Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Series, Berkeley: University of California Press. 189-217.
2006 “” (translated from Chinese), Institute of Sexuality and Gender (中国人民大学姓社会学研究所), People’s University, Beijing, March 4. 15.