Wanjing (Kelly) Chen 陳婉婧
Research Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science
PhD in Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2020
Research Interests:
Infrastructure Finance
Migration and Diaspora Politics
Data Power and Digital Authoritarianism
Global and Digital China
Southeast Asia
Bio:
Wanjing (Kelly) Chen is a research assistant professor in the Division of Social Science and a Junior Fellow of the HKUST Jocky Club Institute for Advanced Study. She received her PhD in geography from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020. She is working on two research projects related to global and digital China. The first project concerns the relation between state and capital in the ongoing globalization of Chinese political economy. Grounded in the mainland Southeast Asia (Laos in particular), Dr. Chen’s examines how the Chinese government mobilizes the offshoring of capital to the region from afar by invoking the imaginative geography of ‘One Belt One Road’. The second project focuses on the contested politics of data in China’s rapidly digitalizing political economy. She is interest to inquire how data is defined, extracted, and instrumentalized in China’s digital surveillance and new media sectors, and the implications of these processes.
Selected Publications:
“Sovereign Debt in the Making: Financial Entanglements and Labor Politics along the Belt and Road in Laos.” Economic Geography (2020), available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00130095.2020.1810011?journalCode=recg20.
“Contingent Proletarianization of Creative Labor: Deskilling in the Xianyou Classical Furniture Cluster.” (co-authored with Jung Won Sonn) Geoforum (2019), 99: 248-256.
“From Pioneers to Brokers: How a diverse Chinese diaspora facilitates the Belt and Road in Laos.” (co-authored with Juliet Lu) Panda Paw Dragon Claw: A Conversation about China’s Footprint beyond its Border (2019).
“Meuang Chin (Chinatown) and the Political Hydrologies of Dispossession in That Luang Marsh.” (Co-authored with Miles Kenney-Lazaar). National University of Singapore: Transboundary Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia (2019).
“Making Possibilities out of the Impossible: Rural Migrant Workers’ Backdoor Economies and the Pitfall in Lao PDR.” Kyoto University: Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, 25 (2018, Available in English, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Japanese).