Li Zhang
Department Chair and Professor
PhD, Cornell University, 1998
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616, USA
Telephone: (530) 554-1828
Fax: (530) 752-8885
Office Hours for Spring 2012:
- W 2-3:30 and by appointment
Biography:
EDUCATION
I received my doctoral degree in anthropology from Cornell University in 1998 and a M.A. degree in social relations from UC Irvine in 1993. Before coming to the U.S., I studied Chinese literature and literary theory at Peking University and received my B.A. and first M.A. there. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University (1998--1999).
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Urban studies (especially space-making, urban planning, and power dynamics); global middle-classes and consumption practices; psychological anthropology and mental health; selfhood and therapeutic processes; labor migration; postsocialism; critique of neoliberalism; East Asia (especially China).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Broadly speaking my research concerns the social, political, and cultural repercussions of market reform and socialist transformations in contemporary China. My earlier work traces the profound reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China's "floating population" under late socialism and globalization. Recently I have completed my second book that examines the social and spatial implications of housing privatization and the making of the new middle classes in urban China. I have also co-edited a volume with Aihwa Ong, which explores how social technologies of privatization and neoliberalism articulate with diverse areas of life and politics in China. My current new research project explores the "inner revolution" brought by the market transition through examining an emergent psychotherapy and psychological counseling movement in Chinese cities. I am interested in how Western psychological formulations of the person through talk therapy articulate with local cultural notions of a socially embedded selfhood and neoliberal notions of self-care and self-management.
I was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, and the University of California President's Office among others.
PUBLICATIONS
Books
2010 In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis, Cornell University Press (Winner of the 2011 Francis L. Hsu Book Prize, presented by the Society of East Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association).
2008 Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press.
2001 Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press (Winner of the 2002 Robert E. Park Award, presented by the Community & Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association).
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
In Press "Flexible Postsocialist Assemblages from the Margin," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique.
2010 "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?" in Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of Modern Cities, edited by Gyan Prakash. Princeton University Press.
2010 "Articulating Middle-Class Culture, Consumption, and Postsocialism," Dialectical Anthropology.
2009 "Chinese Workers Confront Capitalist Labour Relations," Labour/La Travail Vol. 63: 221-229.
2008 "China's Ascent As a Theoretial Question," AAA Anthropology News, November.
2008 "Introduction: Privatizing China: Powers of the Self, Socialism from Afar," (co-authored with Aihwa Ong) in Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press.
2008 "Private Homes, Distinct Lifestyles: Performing a New Middle-Class," in Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press.
2006 "Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late Socialist China," Current Anthropology, 47 (3): 461-484.
2006 "From the Mountains and the Fields: The Urban Transition in the Anthropology of China" (co-authored with Alan Smart). China Information Vol XX (3): 481-518.
2004 "Forced From Home: Property Rights, Civic Activism, and the Politics of Relocation in China," Urban Anthropology, Vol 33(2-4): 247-81.
2002 “Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China,” Public Culture 14 (2): 311-334.
2002 “Urban Experiences and Social Belonging among Chinese Rural Migrants” in Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, 275-299, Perry Link, Richard Madsen, Paul Pickowicz, eds. The Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
2001 “Migration and Privatization of Space and Power in Late Socialist China.” American Ethnologist 28 (1): 179-205.
2001 “Contesting Crime, Order and Migrant Spaces in Beijing” in Ethnographies of the Urban in Contemporary China, 201-222, Nancy Chen et al, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.
2000 “The Interplay of Gender, Space, and Work among China’s Floating Population” in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Household, and Gender in China, 171-196, Gail Henderson and Barbara Entwisle, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
