Profile

PhD from Yale University

Minhua Ling is a sociocultural anthropologist and uses ethnography as a basis to explore three sets of related research interests: 1) the various forms of mobility and how they are shaped, experienced, and interpreted; 2) the (re)making of inequality in everyday life; and 3) the challenges to sustainable livelihood facing underprivileged individuals and communities. Her book The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai’s Edge (2020, Stanford University Press) offers the first longitudinal study of China’s second-generation rural-to-urban migrant youth navigating from schools to labour and consumer markets and examines urban governance through everyday practices of inclusion and exclusion. Currently she is working on multiple research projects including a second book project on rural transformation and its socioecological implications in China after three decades of rural-urban migration and state-led urbanization.

Prior to joining Geneva Graduate Institute, Dr. Ling was a 2022-23 Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor with tenure between 2013 and 2022.

At Geneva Graduate Institute, Dr. Ling teaches courses and supervises theses in the areas of mobility, urbanization, food and health, socio-ecological sustainability, and sociocultural transformation in China and East Asia in addition to anthropological research methodology.

THEMATIC EXPERTISE
 

• Urban & rural worlds
• City governance
• Knowledge, education & aid policies
• Environmental governance & policies
• Sustainability, sustainable development & SDGs
  
   

GEOGRAPHICAL EXPERTISE
 

• China
• Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
  
   

publication

Book

• Ling, M. 2020. The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai’s Edge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

• Ling, M. 2023. “Food Shortage and its Discontents during the Shanghai Lockdown.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 13(2): 298-307.
• Ling, M. 2022. “Snail Households’: Containerization of Migrant Livelihood on Shanghai’s Fringe.” positions: asia critique. 30(3): 549-570.
• Ling, M. 2021. “Container housing: Formal informality and deterritorialised home-making amid bulldozer urbanism in Shanghai.” Urban Studies. 58 (6): 1141-1157.
• Ling, M. 2020. “Living between Incongruous Worlds in Hong Kong.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10 (2): 308-312.
• Ling, M. 2017. “Returning to No Home: Educational Remigration and Displacement in Rural China.” Anthropological Quarterly 90 (3): 715-742.
• Ling, M. 2017. “Precious Son, Reliable Daughter: Redefining Son Preference in Migrant Households in Urban China.” The China Quarterly 229: 150-171.
• Ling, M. 2015. “Bad students go to vocational schools!’: Education, Social Reproduction and Migrant Youth in Urban China.” The China Journal 73: 108-131.
   

Book Chapters

• Ling, Minhua and Erik Harms. Forthcoming. “Rural and Urban.” In Anthropological Handbook of Mobility, edited by Noel B Salazar. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Ling, M. 2024. “Reconfiguring Home: Rural-bound Return and Translocal Householding in Post-Reform China.” In States of Return: Migration and Mobility in a Bordered World, edited by Deborah A. Boehm and Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar. New York: New York University Press. pp.166-186.
• Ling, M. 2024. “Internal Migration and Diversification of Foodscapes in Urban China.” In Handbook of Migration, Ethnicity and Diversity, edited by Takeyuki Tsuda. Cheltenham; Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. pp.154-167. 

Special Issues

• Ling, M and Zhang, Juan. (2023). “Currents: Lockdown in Shanghai and beyond: China’s Zero-Covid and its discontents.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 13(2).

Book Reviews

• 2021. “The Children of China’s Great Migration by Rachel Murphy.” The China Quarterly 247: 910-912.
• 2017. “Youth Cultures in China by Jeroen de Kloet and Anthony Fung.” China Perspectives 2017/3: 70.
• 2016. “Class Work: Vocational Schools and China’s Urban Youth by T. E. Woronov.”  American Anthropologist 118 (3): 701-702.
• 2015. “Class in Contemporary China by David S. Goodman.” Anthropos 110 (2): 622‒623.