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About
I am a social and medical anthropologist studying how care is possible and when it becomes impossible. I am interested in how human agency may be compromised and reconfigured in medical contexts, and what that could tell us about the changes in social relations, political governance, and values that we are experiencing today.
My research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with people living with dementia in China during the COVID-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath. I examined how caregiving families, institutions, and the state understand and respond to what I call the ‘opaque’ illness experiences of dementia. I investigated the everyday politics of care across different social levels and the embodied accounts of socio-medical symptoms, such as nightmares, tempo-spatial disorientation, and hallucinations. My interests span kinship, memory, place-making, social crisis, welfare regime, and negative experiences and histories.
As an artist-anthropologist, I have developed several multi-modal projects of engaged anthropology. I have produced a series of research-based artworks in forms of woodprints, film essay, self-publishing, and theatre to invite non-academic discussion about dementia, care, and collective history. My works have been showcased and featured in exhibitions and publications in Basel, New York, Shanghai, and Singapore.
Expertise
Aging, Dementia, Care, China