Doing fieldwork in Taiwan: from research design to writing and publication
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- KLT
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to host a roundtable as part of this year’s Summer School on doing fieldwork in Taiwan, bringing together scholars and researchers to reflect on how projects change from research design to writing and publication.
This roundtable brings together scholars and researchers at different stages of fieldwork in Taiwan to reflect on how fieldwork-focused research projects on Taiwan change in practice. It also brings the discussions and embodied reflections of fieldworkers’ positionalities while doing fieldwork in Taiwan.
Drawing on experiences of preparing for, undertaking, and stepping back from fieldwork in Taiwan across anthropology, sociology, history and political science, the discussion will explore how projects are first imagined, how they shift in response to lived realities, how relationships and trust are built with different communities, how researchers work across archives, interviews, participant observation, and digital spaces, and, eventually, how field materials are eventually shaped into dissertations, articles, and books.
Image credit: Sam Chang via Unsplash.
About the speakers
Lee An-Ru is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College, CUNY. Her research focuses on the Asia-Pacific region and on questions of capitalism, modernity, gender and sexuality, and urban anthropology. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring and Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, and co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society and the gender and women’s studies section of the Brill Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies.
Hong-zen Wang is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of Austronesian Studies at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. His research spans gender, migration, Indigenous social development, and economic sociology. He has published widely on migration, gender and Indigenous agriculture in leading international journals, with his work being widely cited across the fields of sociology and social policy.
Sam Robbins is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on the intersections of expertise, democracy, and technology in Taiwan. He is a long term participant and observer of Taiwan's g0v movement and previously worked in digital human rights wok in Taiwan. His dissertation project examines the emergent politics of digital sovereignty in Taiwan through a case study of the country's AI development strategy. He is a 2026 Fulbright Scholar and is moving to Taiwan in September for fieldwork.
Chengyu Yang is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol, supported by the Bristol Postgraduate Research Scholarship and GTA Award. His research examines maritime borderlands, infrastructure, and the anthropology of futures, with a focus on Kinmen, Taiwan’s offshore archipelago facing Xiamen. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kinmen and his current affiliation as a visiting researcher at National Taiwan University, Chengyu studies how island residents negotiate livelihoods, mobility, uncertainty, and cross-strait politics through coastal infrastructures, oyster farming, marine debris, and unbuilt projects such as the Kinmen-Xiamen Bay Bridge.
