My research investigates people’s intensive moral economies in global Asian contexts, such as grassroots Confucian movement and migrant workers’ self-study.

Through ethnographic and sociohistorical approaches, my scholarship conceptualizes the situational dynamics of “stake,” “intensity,” “wisdom,” “urgency,” and “radicalism” across social domains including education and religion; media and language; gender and family; and grassroots society and state sociocultural engineering.

I am also an avid teacher, writer, and ethnographic journalist. I am deeply committed to facilitating creative forms of anthropological public engagement. Among others, I co-founded and serve as editor of Tying Knots (结绳志), the most influential public anthropology platform in China.