Dr.Tommy Tse
(Principal Investigator)
Dr. Tommy Tse is an Assistant Professor at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. He specialises in East Asia’s media and cultural industries, creative labour, consumer culture and sociology of fashion. He completed his PhD degree at the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, conducting ethnographic research on the intricate production and mediation of fashion as a symbolic and cultural product in and through various institutions in Hong Kong and across Asia.
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For details, see: https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/s/h.l.t.tse/h.l.t.tse.html
Dr. Johanna von Pezold
With a background in Chinese Studies, Johanna von Pezold has been conducting ethnographic research on Chinese fashion in Africa for more than six years. After studying in Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Oxford, and Beijing, she recently graduated with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Hong Kong, examining the creation of fashion in the trade and retail of Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique. She has worked for various think tanks and management consulting firms in Germany, Brazil, and China, and is the first recipient of the CHAT Research Grant, awarded by the Hong Kong Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile. Johanna is enthusiastic about China-Africa relations, pop culture, chickens, and everything colourful.
Dr. Jupiter Wang
Wai WANG (Jupiter) Wei Wang (Jupiter) received his PhD in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research explores China’s multi-dimensional global influences on Africa through ethnographic inquiries with grounded Chinese-African interactions. He previously studied the African community in Guangzhou, China. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the cross-border marriage between Chinese men and Ethiopian women who formed their marriages in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, and its neighboring areas. It spotlights global China’s incompatible hard and soft power as a rising global South instead of a global North country.
Fairuzah Munaaya Atchulo
Hello there! I am a PhD researcher of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. I hold a Joint Master degree in ERASMUS Mundus Master’s Excellence Programme “Euroculture” from Groningen University and the University of Uppsala. I also spent over five (5) years in South Korea where I pursued a Masters in Development Policy from KDI School of Public Policy and Development, and also attained a Bachelor Degree in International Studies with a concentration in International Law and Diplomacy and East Asian Studies from Ewha Womans University. In Uppsala, I worked with the EU RESPOND Horizon 2020 Project on issues related to migration, refugee law and integration within the EU. My research areas are in history, culture, diplomacy, East Asian Studies, policy, and international law.
Qidi Feng
Qidi Feng received his bachelors in English and Anthropology from Sun Yat-sen University, with a focus on the recreational life of Nigerian expats in Guangzhou. His ethnographic research lasted five years from 2017 to 2022, and documented the changes in the African diasporic community in China through the COVID-19 pandemic. He received his master's degree in urban studies from London School of Economics in 2021.
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After that, Qidi Feng worked as a research curator at Guangdong Times Museum for two years. His work consisted of art projects and exhibitions focusing on migration life, ethnicities and identity politics, especially in Southwest China and Indochina. He worked with artists, designers, researchers and curators under multi-disciplinary disciplinaries.
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In this ERC Project, he will adopt methodologies from different disciplines, focusing on the materiality of fashion items and identity-making through production.
Dr Sérgio Chichava
Dr.SérgioChichava is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (IESE) in Mozambique, where he leads a new research program on rising powers and development. His current work focuses on the role of China and Brazil in Mozambique’s agriculture sector, and his most recent publications include China and Mozambique: From Comrades to Capitalists, coedited with Chris Alden, and Brazil and China in Mozambican Agriculture: Emerging Insights from the Field. Chichava has lectured in the sociology of politics and Mozambican politics at Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, and has held fellowships at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD in political science from Bordeaux University, focusing on African politics.
For details, see: https://www.iese.ac.mz/sergio-inacio-chichava/
Dr. Erica de Greef
Dr.Erica de Greef is an independent fashion curator, decolonial fashion activist, writer, maker and academic. She has lectured extensively in tertiary fashion education, contributing to the local fashion industry in many ways. She holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cape Town. Her thesis, titled ‘Sartorial Disruption’ investigated the contemporary stasis of the dress and fashion collections in South African Museums, arguing for the decolonial potential of contemporary African fashion praxis.
For details, see: https://afri.digital/about/
Prof Charles Nzioka
Prof. Charles Nzioka is the Chair and Professor of Sociology and Social Work at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. He held a PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. has a wealth of experience in research and teaching and at the university level. His research interests lie in the areas of medical sociology, HIV & AIDS, human reproductive health, poverty and social research methods.
For details, see: https://socialsciences.uonbi.ac.ke/college-professors/charles-nzioka
Prof Pun Ngai
Prof. Pun Ngai is Chair Professor & Head of Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. She received her PhD from the University of London, SOAS in 1998. She is the winner of the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for her book, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). Made in China is widely used as required reading in major universities in America, Europe, and Asia. Together with Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), these two texts have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Chinese. Two of her Chinese books were also awarded Hong Kong Book Prize 2007 and 2011 as the top ten popular books, widely read in Hong Kong and Mainland China. She published extensively and cross-disciplinary in top-tier journals in the areas of Cultural Studies, China Studies, Labor Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology.
For details, see: https://www.ln.edu.hk/cultural/staff/pun-ngai/index.php
Prof Bin Shen
Prof. Bin Shen is is an Associate Dean of Research and International Collaboration, and a Full Professor in Glorious Sun School of Business and Management in Donghua University, Shanghai. He is Humboldt Fellow in Germany. He has published more than 60 academic articles in leading journals, such as Production and Operations Management, Journal of Business Research, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, International Journal of Production Economics, etc. He won The Textile Institute Research Publication Award from The Textile Institute in 2016.
For details, see: https://glxy.dhu.edu.cn/glxyen/45/38/c20174a279864/page.psp
Dr. Nina Sylvanus
Dr. Nina Sylvanus is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University. She is a political and economic anthropologist whose work centers on capital and labor, value and aesthetics, infrastructure and technology, and, more broadly, critical transformations in the neoliberal global economy. Her regional specialism is West Africa, specifically China-in-Africa, and its impact on the world at large. Sylvanus received her doctoral training in Anthropology and African Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA before taking up her first teaching position in the Anthropology Department at Reed College. She joined Northeastern in 2010.
Sylvanus is the author of Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a study of the dense materiality and rich signifying qualities of African print cloth – which, she shows, offers a cogent theoretical and methodological frame for understanding colonial and postcolonial patterns of value production and exchange.
For details, see: https://cssh.northeastern.edu/faculty/nina-sylvanus/