Care and Gender Cluster

This cluster seeks to bring scholars from various disciplines to discuss gender and care from empirical and analytical points of view. In recent years, interdisciplinary scholars have addressed discourses and acts of care on the topics of gender and housework, childcare and fertility, generation and aging, public health (including mental health), as well as affect and subjectivity. These contributions on care – as practices of labor, gifting, exchange, love, governance, self-management, and personhood – highlight the necessity of attending to the potentialities and possibilities of gender and care as analytical frameworks that may help us to re-imagine our relationships with nature and non-human kin; to redefine our meanings of family, labor, gender, identity, family relations, and community; and to redraw the boundaries that confine us to our disciplinary, national, and gendered forms of inclusion and belonging. Our mission is to provide a platform of scholarly exchange to collaboratively brainstorm novel and intersectional perspectives on care and gender. By privileging gender and care as the focus of our conversations, we hope to encourage and inspire new questions and formulations that will address the problems of climate change, public health, social justice, governance, urban and economic development.

Cluster Leads

Nellie Chu

Nellie Chu is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on global supply chains in fashion and the transnational role of migrant entrepreneurs. She has a project on West African and Korean religious communities related to the doctrine of prosperity based in Guangzhou, China. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include cultures and movements, global China studies and cultural anthropology.

Mengqi Wang

Mengqi Wang is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on economic anthropology and how home ownership and property relations implicate and structure state power, capitalism and everyday life in post-socialist China, as well as among overseas Chinese. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include cultures and movements, global China studies, urban studies and cultural anthropology.

Yu Wang

Yu Wang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on the role of intermarriage and individual achievement as pathways to social mobility in China during a period of rapid economic, social and demographic change. Her current project is about the interaction between demographic changes and assortative mating in contemporary China. Her articles have appeared in journals including Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, American Journal of Public Health, and Contraception.

Cluster Members

Keping Wu

Keping Wu is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focus is the intersection among religion, gender, urbanization, public good, ethnicity, and charisma. She is especially interested in how people cross religious, ethnic, rural-urban and other boundaries. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include ethnography of China, ethnicity and diversity, and urbanization and changing religious landscapes. She is the editor (with Robert Weller) of "It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth" (Berghahn 2019) and the co-author (with Robert Weller, C. Julia Huang-Lemmon and Lizhu Fan 2019) of "Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies" (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has had papers published in leading academic journals including Current Anthropology, Modern China and Journal of Asian Studies. She has been a member of the American Anthropological Association and Association of Asian Studies since 2006. Wu has a B.A. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she taught at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Sun Yat-sen University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Robin Rodd

Robin Rodd is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. His current research is at the interface of critical theory, Latin American studies and anthropology. His work explores political memory and the symbolic bases of citizenship, democracy and dictatorship in Latin America. He has also done long-term fieldwork in lowland Amazonia focusing on indigenous notions of mind, knowledge, and health. At Duke Kunshan, his teaching interests span medical and political anthropology, Latin American cultures and politics, migration and citizenship studies, and critical theory.

Hyun Jeong Ha

Hyun Jeong Ha is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include power, religion, sectarianism, and gender in the Middle East. She has written about Muslim-Christian relations in contemporary Egypt, and her current research examines how the 2011 Egyptian Arab Uprisings have affected the sectarian relations from an intersectional approach, or the consideration of class, gender, and geography. Trained as an ethnographer, she has conducted field research in Cairo, Egypt, from 2006. Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Changes, and Education and the Arab Spring: Resistance, reform, and democracy (edited volume), among others. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include social theories, social problems, identity and emotions, and religion and politics in the Middle East.

Megan Rogers

Megan Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on religion in contemporary China, and she has a particular interest in the intersection of religion and social inequality. She has conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork in China, including as a Fulbright fellow in Suzhou in 2015 and 2016). Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include sociology, culture and movements, religion, and China studies. Rogers has bachelor's degrees in international studies and Chinese from the University of Mississippi, an M.A. in Chinese from the Ohio State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Global Religion Research Initiative, University of Notre Dame.

Fangsheng Zhu

Fangsheng Zhu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Fangsheng Zhu is a sociologist and studies education, particularly the interactions between families, education providers and governments. His research topics include parenting, school admissions and education policies. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include public policy, methods and education.

Binbin Li

Dr. Binbin Li is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences at Duke Kunshan University. She holds a secondary appointment with Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Her research focuses on loss of biodiversity, endangered and endemic species conservation such as giant pandas, priority setting and management of protected areas, and promotion of innovative technology, markets and policies to solve conservation problems and local community development. Dr. Li’s work covers the identification of conservation priorities and national parks in China, impacts of One Belt One Road on biodiversity, giant panda conservation and management via Footprint Identification Technique (FIT), impacts of oil palm and rubber plantations on biodiversity in Southeast Asia, influence of national environmental policies on human-wildlife conflicts, and behavioral study of endemic species. She is also a member of the IUCN SSC Small Mammal Specialist Group.

Student Coordinator

  • Lingyi Shen
  • Kennedy McNeilly-Anta

Main Projects and Research Topics

  • Nellie Chu. Precarious Accumulation: Migrant Bosses and Fast Fashion in Transnational Guangzhou
  • Mengqi Wang. Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market.
  • Yu Wang. Rising educational hypogamy among internal migrants in China.
  • Yu Wang. Married Men’s Economic Dependency, Working Overtime, and Middle-aged Men Health Trajectory in Urban China.
  • Yu Wang. Assortative Mating, Division of paid labor, and Wealth in China.
  • Yu Wang. Gender inequality, sibship size, family status, and child vaccination: Evidence from a cross-sectional study in Zhejiang, China.