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Faculty Fellow

Julie Chu

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences in the College; Associated faculty, Divinity School University of Chicago

Biography

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.

Project

Strings of binary code, a row of shoppers with carts, a barge with shipping containers

Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds

2020 – 2023