Yunhan Wen

I’m a Ph.D candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. My research is fundamentally driven by my curiosity about "the urban": how it came to be, and what it has brought. Toward this goal, I study how indigenous villages in Chinese megacities participate in urbanization and economic development as a way to understand how urbanization has changed state-society relations as China rapidly urbanizes.

Specifically, using a comparative ethnographic study of indigenous villages in Shanghai and Shenzhen, two megacities in China where indigenous villages have drastically different political autonomy, I investigate whether and how the institutional legacies of China's industrialization-based urbanization in the first decade of its economic reform carry on to its land-based urbanization driven by the financialization of land in the past two decades.  

I'm omnivorous in my intellectual interests and methods, perhaps too much for my own good. In addition to my doctoral research, I have done research on sexual practices among older adults in rural South Africa, computational methods that treat text as data, and the history of bathroom construction in the PRC.