Research workshops

At MCI, we support our academic community through tailored workshops for faculty research affiliates, postdoctoral researchers, and visiting scholars. These workshops include collaborative sessions to refine book manuscripts and gatherings for contributors to edited volumes, fostering meaningful progress in their research projects.

Featured workshops 

Book manuscript workshop: Elena Barabantseva, “Migration, Marriage and Race Across China-Russia Borders”, 3 May 2024.

In her book manuscript, Elena argues that the focus on marriage migration as a site of geopolitical and intimate projects reveals complexity of the politics of desire, marriage, and race in China’s struggle for national rejuvenation. Each workshop participant provided feedback on a chapter, and workshop participants discussed it together.

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Edited volume workshop: Ed Pulford (SALC), ‘China as Context’ 16-17 June 2022

Chinese-grounded ideas remain marginal to anthropology, and scholarly discussions retain a sense of China as an ‘Other’ apart from the ‘real’ world, and thus unsuitable for generating widely applicable theoretical ideas. Amid the end of Western globalisation and shifting anthropological understandings of relations between ethnography and theory, we show how ‘China’ must be understood as the ordinary ‘context’ for anthropological -and other social scientific – research practices worldwide. Around 15 scholars from the UK, China, US, and the Netherlands gave presentations over two days at MCI and LSE.

The edited volume resulting from the workshop is entitled China as Context 背景中国: Anthropology, Post-Globalisation and the Neglect of China and is edited by the workshop organisers Di Wu (Zhejiang University), Andrea Pia (LSE) and Ed Pulford (University of Manchester).