Yukun Zeng
Research Interests
Moral Economy; Language and Media; Education and Labor; Family, Grassroots Movement, and Confucianism; Public Anthropology and Urgent Ethnography
Research Area(s)
Mainland China, Taiwan, Global Asia
Profile
Yukun Zeng is an anthropologist whose research examines the moral economy of intensive life investment, particularly in the realms of education, labor, language, media, family, and grassroots movements. His book project, Radical Wisdom: Reading Classics and Staking Morality in Contemporary Chinese Confucianism, explores grassroots Confucian revival movements in mainland China and Taiwan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and sociohistorical analysis of the Global Asian experience, his work theorizes key concepts such as “hardship,” “stake,” and “labor intensity.”
Committed to public engagement, he spent six months in 2020 working as a journalist covering COVID-related stories, which inspired his ongoing exploration of intersections between journalism and anthropology through platforms such as the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the World Anthropological Union. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of Tying Knots (结绳志, https://tyingknots.net), a public anthropology initiative experimenting with urgent, engaged ethnography.
Before joining the Max Planck Institute, Zeng was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.