Aihwa Ong, Professor
Anthropology, Sociocultural Anthropology
Cultural anthropology, modernity, transnationalism, citizenship, global cities, migration. Southeast Asia, China, contemporary U.S.
Profile
As a foreign-born anthropologist, Aihwa Ong has always approached research from vantage points outside or athwart the United States. This angle of inquiry unsettles and troubles stabilized viewpoints and units of analysis in the social sciences. Ong's projects -- the impact of runaway factories on the Muslim women in Malaysia; overseas Chinese navigating multiple immigration regimes; the disciplinary regimes that socialize Cambodian refugees in California; the selective deployment of neoliberal norms in China; and the interaction of biotechnologies and ethics in Asian contexts – are investigations on the situated nature of global phenomena that challenge conventional anthropological frameworks.
Ong’s approach is inter-disciplinary and her ideas -- "flexible citizenship," "graduated sovereignty," "global assemblages," among others – are featured in debates on globalization and modernity. She has lectured internationally and been invited to the World Economic Forum. Her awards include grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and some book prizes.
On campus, Ong is affiliated with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Global Metropolitan Studies Center, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Recent Events
Nov. 2009 The Eric Wolf Lecture, “What Marco Polo Forgot: Asian Art Projects Negotiate the Global”
Austrain Academy of Sciences, Vienna
April 2009 Keynote presentation, “Re-spatializing the Social: the neoliberal problematic in China,” at
The University of Chicago School of Social Welfare, Anniversary Celebrations, Paris
June 2006, Co-organizer, Workshop on “Asian Biotech,” Honolulu. Funded by the University of California, Pacific Rim Research Program.
Representative Publications
Forthcoming Books:
Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate. (co-editor Nancy Chen),
Durham: Duke University Press, 2010
Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global (co-editor, Ananya Roy), London: Routledge, 2011
Selected Publications:
2008 Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar. Cornell University Press
(co-editor Li Zhang)
2008 “The Human and Ethical Living,” In Globalizing the Research Imagination, ed. Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey, pp.87-100. London: Routledge
2006, “Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology,” Transactions 31 (2006) 1-6
2006. “Please Stay: Pied-a-Terre Subjects in the Megacity,” Citizenship Studies Vol. 11, no. 1 (2007): 83-93.
2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.
2006. "Experiments with Freedom: Milieus of the Human"
American Literary History (March 1, 2006).
2004. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
(co-editor Stephen J. Collier). Malden, Ma. and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
2004. "The Chinese Axis: Zoning Technologies and Variegated Sovereignty," Journal of East Asian Studies 4 (2004), 69-96.
2003. Buddha in Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America (University of California Press, Public Anthropology Series). (Italian translation, 2005.)
2003. "Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics among Transnational Chinese" Interventions 5(1):82-100.
2003. "Higher Learning: Educational Availability and Flexible Citizenship in Global Space" in Diversity and Citizenship Education, ed. James A. Banks, New York: J. Wiley, pp. 49-70.
2001. Modernity, Anthropological Aspects. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 15. N. J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds. Pp. 9944-49. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon.
2000. Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia. Theory, Culture, and Society. 17(4):55-75.
1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Honorable Mention, Senior Prize, American Ethnological
Association (2000) and Cultural Studies Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies (2001). (German translation, 2004.)
1999. "Muslim Feminists in the Shelter of Corporate Islam," Citizenship Studies Vol. 3, no. 3:355-71.
1997. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (co-edited with Donald Nonini). New York: Routledge.
1995. Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Michael Peletz (co-editor). Berkeley: University of California Press.
1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.