Biography
Supervisor: Michael Keith
College affiliation: Wolfson College
Yinglei is a DPhil candidate in Migration Studies (Anthropology) based at COMPAS. Her research interests lie in urban anthropology, the geopolitics of mobility and the hierarchy in the southwest ethnic region of China. Her research investigates the spatial logic of cities built in ethnic minority areas under the socialist politico-economic system and China’s ethnic structure and its interplay with the social and spatial mobilities of the urban elites. She draws on a multidisciplinary analysis of anthropology, urban studies, and migration studies, combining qualitative urban ethnography with quantitative methods to capture the macro urban processes of Zhaojue from the imperial era to the present, the subjective mobile experience of the urban residents, the corresponding flows of their economic, social, cultural, and reproductive activities, and their intersubjective understandings about materials, hierarchy, ethnicity, and historical and structural constraints.
Publications
Chen, Yinglei (2013). Security Migrant Guards without Personal Security, The Destined Immigrant and The Accidental Millionaire. Lian Si, ed. The Development Report on Chinese Youth: The Rise of New Urban Immigrants, 2013, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, pp264-284