Short Biography

Jingyu Mao received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include work and migration, ethnicity, gender, rural-urban divide, intimacy and emotion. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bielefeld University, working for the ERC-funded project “WelfareStruggles”, which comparatively looks at welfare provisions for global factory workers in China and Vietnam. She is working on a monography based on her PhD thesis.

Project

This project, building on her PhD thesis, continues to explore how social encounters experienced by service workers play an important role in migrant workers’ worldmaking processes in Southwest China. It focuses on how an ‘ordinary city’ (Robinson, 2006) become a site of worldmaking for migrant service workers; and how do workers’ local struggles speak to broader social and global concerns. It continues to focus on the under-theorised ethnic minority migrants in China, and seeks to understand the role ethnicity plays in migrant workers’ worldmaking processes.