I joined Carmah as a PhD candidate in October 2021. My research project focuses on the Grand Canal World Heritage in China and its heritage-making process. The Grand Canal is a heritage, infrastructure, and ecosystem complex in which co-existence, competition, and negotiation occur at local, national, and global levels. The intertwined life history of the Grand Canal and human societies and the complex world heritage inscription reflect different ways of framing heritage. I attempt to articulate that the Grand Canal not only has the universal values and meanings of World Heritage and faces the political, value, and ethical challenges common to World Heritage but also has the encounters, values, and meanings at the level of Chinese and local societies. My PhD project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Sharon Macdonald and funded by China Scholarship Council.

My research interests also include space studies, urban studies, and material culture. Before my PhD, I earned my master degree in Social Anthropology at Peking University and studied Ethnology at the Minzu University of China (BA). During these periods, I did my research in an urban Muslim community to explore the relationship between space history and family structures, business operations as well as religious practices.