Julia Qermezi Huang is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on the social and structural effects of market-driven forms of poverty alleviation and development. Her doctoral thesis, 'Do it yourself' development: ambiguity and relational work in a Bangladesh social enterprise(2016), is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northwest Bangladesh and northeast India among organizations seeking to convert the poor into entrepreneurs able to innovate their way out of poverty.

Juli's work documents the struggles and ambiguities of young women working as entrepreneurial 'information agents' as they deal with the transitions from home-based work to outside work, from philanthropic modes of development organization to dispassionate market-driven ones, and from paternalistic patronage relations to detached ones promising “empowerment.” She traces changes within a social enterprise model in the context of emergent global development priorities, shifting class structures and relations, and gendered constraints and opportunities in the country. As Bangladesh further experiments with governance structures, liberalizes its economy, decentralizes its state functions, and submits its poverty-alleviation plans to markets, young unmarried women--as garment workers, health extension workers, microcredit customers, and development entrepreneurs--bear a remarkable burden of emergent and contradictory expectations and new forms of accumulation.

Juli currently teaches economic anthropology and has previously taught in courses on the anthropology of development and social entrepreneurship. She is developing a new research project to explore how ideas about women's entrepreneurship (and the attendant 'ways of being' they promote) travel across political, economic, and social terrains. Contrastive ethnographic research among women entrepreneurs across public, private, and civil society sectors in Bangladesh will cast new light on the ways in which low-income women experience the relations, materialities, and knowledges of entrepreneurial work and negotiate new space in a patriarchal and highly unequal society. 

In a previous life, Juli lived for extended periods (1991-2004) in the Zagros mountains of Iran, where she conducted ethnographic field research among Qashqa'i nomadic pastoralists.