Xuyi Zhao

Xuyi Zhao is an urban ethnographer broadly interested in city-making, temporality, gender, and (im)mobility. Her current research investigates state-engineered urbanization in Southwest China at the intersection of infrastructural urbanism, community building, and the reconfigurations of time. Based on 15 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, her doctoral dissertation traces, inter alia, what futures are prefigured or precluded by master-planned urban transformation, what kinds of political consciousness and collective imagination are engendered in the process, and how they materialize to both perpetuate and change social dynamics surrounding class, family, and work.