Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China's Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers traversing the Taiwan Strait, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific (via ports and border zones spanning the PRC and the U.S.), this work examines how certain figures of "infrastructure" animate the global politics of time in three distinct keys -- as matters of constancy, rhythm and non/event.
A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video and other multimedia projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing two new ethnographic foci:
(1) on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of renao (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or, literally, “heat and noise”)
(2) on the politics and poetics of logistics, especially in relation to e-commerce driven innovations in moving goods, people and information according to increasing aspirations for on-demand, seamless "fulfillment." This includes launching the collaborative research project, "Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds," the cross-platform online discussion of #Logistics in the Time of Covid, and the Spring 2022 issue of Roadsides on #Logistics.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
n.d.
The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China's Global Edge (book manuscript in progress).
n.d.
Fulfillment: A Field Guide to the Logistical City, ethnographic 360 project in production (co-directed with Daria Tsoupikova).
2024
“Schlock Value and the Politics of Fiasco,” Public Culture 36(2): 255-277
2022
Introduction: #Logistics. Roadsides 007 (Spring 2022): 1-7 (co-authored with Tina Harris).
2021
Sidewalk Terror and the Logistical Hauntings of the Flâneur. Counterpunch.
2020
Un/boxing Fulfillment: A Field Guide to Logistical Worlds. Allegra Lab (co-authored with Kenzell Huggins, Harini Kumar, Jack Mullee and Heangjin Park).
2019
Cruel Optimism and the Settler-Colonial Roots of White Grievance. Counterpunch.
2018
Risky Work, Fateful Play: Chinese Customs Inspectors and the Compossibility of Fortune. Ethnos 84 (2): 201-222.
2017
Risk, Fate, Fortune: The Lives and Times of Customs Inspectors in Southern China. In Filippo Osella and Daromir Rudnyckyj, eds., Religion and the Morality of Markets. Cambridge University Press.
2016
Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Technics of Comfort. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society 29: 403-421.
2014
When Infrastructures Attack: The Workings of Disrepair in China. American Ethnologist 14 (2): 351-367.
2011
The Noise of Data: Comments on Ewald's "After Risk." Carceral Notebooks 7 (2011): 109-118.
2010
Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press.
2010
The Attraction of Numbers: Accounting for Ritual Expenditures in Fuzhou, China. Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): 132-142.
2009
Departing China: Identification Papers and the Pursuit of Burial Rights in Fuzhou. In Sabine Berking and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Between Life and Death; Governing Populations in the Era of Human Rights. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
2007
Equation Fixations: On the Whole and the Sum of Dollars in Foreign Exchange. In A. Truitt & S. Senders, eds., Money: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
2006
To Be ‘Emplaced’: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 13(3): 395-425.
2001
When Alan Turning Was a Computer: Notes on the Rise and Decline of Punch Card Technologies. Connect: art.politics.theory.practice 1(2).
2000
Meet Halo Halo, 28-minute video documentary produced and directed.
I work between cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology to study how ideas, logics, norms and values are authorized, enacted, institutionalized, and scaled as expertise. I conduct my fieldwork in the United States, where experts influence most every aspect of contemporary life, if often in the face of significant public skepticism.
My research focuses on professions that take human behavior and interiority as the object of their expertise: social work, counseling psychology, and behavioral health. Dually appointed in the Crown School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, I am dedicated to illuminating how the helping professions distill historically traceable debates and predominant logics about agency, care, communication, (in)dependence, personhood, presence, science, and truth. My first book, Scripting Addiction, is an ethnography of mainstream American addiction treatment. My second, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (2023), is an ethnography that chronicles the remarkable spread of a behavioral health method, called motivational interviewing, and the pragmatism that infuses it.
My current project is a study of Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT). It seeks to understand how an iconic therapy animal with a rich service history—the American Dog—is trained and deployed in a variety of clinical and social service settings. This project extends my ongoing inquiry into the social histories, logics and economics of therapeutic practices and institutions, as well as my broader interest in expertise. Specifically, it asks how and why American dogs have increasingly come to be seen as expert communicators and caregivers—particularly in an age when more and more American humans grapple with our lack of care for other species.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. (edited with Michael Lempert). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
2022. "Legitimating Evidence: The Trans-institutional Life of Evidence-Based Practice." With Hannah Obertino Norwood. In press, Social Science & Medicine.
2021. "Learning How Not to Know: Pragmatism, (In)expertise, and the Training of American Helping Professionals," American Anthropologist.
2019. "The Work of 'Crisis' in the 'Opioid Crisis.'" Journal of Extreme Anthropology 3(2): 161-166.
2016. "Pragmatics of Scale." With Michael Lempert. In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, E.S. Carr & M. Lempert, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2016. "Interscaling Awe, De-escalating Disaster." With Brooke Fisher. In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, E.S. Carr & M. Lempert, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2015. "Occupation Bedbug: Or, the Urgency and Agency of Professional Pragmatism." Cultural Anthropology 30(2): 257-285.
2014. "The poetics of therapeutic practice: Motivational interviewing and the powers of pause." With Yvonne Smith. Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry 38:83-114.
2013. "'Signs of the times': Confession and the semiotic production of inner truth." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) (19): 34-51.
2013. "Signs of Sobriety: Rescripting American Addiction Counseling." In Addiction Trajectories, Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds. Duke University Press.
2010. "Enactments of expertise." Annual Review of Anthropology (39): 17-32.
2010. "Qualifying the qualitative social work interview: A linguistic anthropological approach." Qualitative Social Work: 123-43.
2009. "Anticipating and inhabiting institutional identities." American Ethnologist 36(2): 317-36.
2006. "Secrets keep you sick: Metalinguistic labor in a drug treatment program for homeless women." Language in Society 35(5): 631-53.
Ralph W. Nicholas does research on South Asian societies and cultures with an emphasis on Bengal. He has done research on religion, including Hindu rites, middle period Bengali narrative, and the relationship between Hinduism and Islam in South Asia. He also has studied kinship and families in Bengal. (Retired June 2000.)
Recent Research / Recent Publications
2016
Thirteen Festivals: A Ritual Year in Bengal. Delhi: RCS and Orient BlackSwan Publishers.
2013
Night of the Gods: Durga Puja in Bengali Society. Delhi: Chronicle Books.
2008
Rites of Spring: Gajan in Village Bengal. Delhi: Chronicle Books.
2002
The Fruits of Worship: Practical Religion in Bengal. Delhi: Chronicle Books.
1982
The village mother in Bengal. In J.J. Preston, ed., Mother Worship: Theme and Variations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 192-209.
1981
The goddess Sitala and epidemic smallpox in Bengal. Journal of Asian Studies 41:21-44.
1977
(with Ronald B. Inden) Kinship in Bengali Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.