Stanford Humanities Center
Wang is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. She holds a PhD minor in history and a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Society. As a political anthropologist, she is interested in understanding what moves people to political action, as well as the intended and unintended consequences of such action. Informed by her experience of growing up in a refinery and petrochemical hub in Southern Taiwan, she is committed to pedagogies of environmental justice and activism against industrial harm.
SHC Project
Refining Politics: Oil Development, Environmental Activism, and Political Improvisation in Rural Malaysia
Wang’s project explores the relationship between identity, "development," and place-making in post-colonial contexts through the lenses of political anthropology, science and technology studies, and theories of space and place. She investigates state-led, large-scale refinery and petrochemical development as a political technology to produce a particular modality of "rural modernity." Her ethnographic fieldwork shows how the materiality, spatiality, and temporality of oil development and its controversies afforded not only the emergence of novel political actors and practices but also the articulation of new political subjectivities and solidarities among "ethnic minority" Chinese Malaysians in rural Malaysia. Her work speaks to an interdisciplinary audience interested in "rural development," oil politics, social movements and collective action, racial and ethnic formation, and diaspora studies.
