DPhil Student
St Hugh's College
Research:
My research examines changing relationships between labor, capital, and governance in China, specifically focusing on how technological innovation, trade pressures, and state-led industrial upgrade reshape everyday working lives.
My doctoral thesis, Utopia of Indolence: Imagining and Inhabiting Housing in China’s Rust Belt, examines a notable shift in the labor landscape in China, namely when disenfranchised migrant workers chose to withdraw from industrial wage labor, and pick up online gig work, while dwelling in geographically peripheral and low-cost localities to adopt a low-income and low-spending lifestyle. Through a 14-month ethnographic fieldwork, I traced the migration of rural youths who, disillusioned with precarious urban life, relocated from megacities to Hegang, China’s city with the lowest housing price in the northeast rustbelt.
Previously, in my master's thesis, titled "Mediating Femininity: The Politics of Gender on Chinese Livestreaming Platforms," I examined how the paradoxical logics between "liberating" and "constraining" in both neoliberal politics and digital infrastructures in post-reform China have produced a singularized ideal of femininity on livestreaming platforms, which is then further abstracted and appropriated into non-human and robotic forms in the livestreaming industry.
I received a BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford.
Research interests: Post-Socialism; Northeast China; Ruination and decay; Labour transitions; Digital ethnography; Gender and Femininity.
Website: https://www.siyutang.com/
Contact details: siyu.tang@anthro.ox.ac.uk
