My research explores intersections between collaborative ethnography and visual anthropology. My work combines analysis of media production projects in a minority community in China with participatory video projects in the same community. In January 2006, these efforts culminated in a film festival organized with the Moso Folk Museum. Screening films about the Moso people for an audience comprised of Moso people led to conversations about representation and identity, and also prompted reflections on the future of Moso cultures and communities. [See the Moso Film Festival home page.] I examine these local developments in the context of China's increasing commercialization of media production and growing emphasis on the 'culture industry' as a vehicle for economic growth.

Matters of representation are always important to ethnographic work. By engaging with a variety of mediums or technologies of representation--text, video, still images--I make these issues stand out more starkly by contrast to each other, and hopefully afford some reciprocal illumination as well. My research in the second largest city of Indonesia focuses on people who make a living on the streets, especially children. Here, even impoverished street kids are already bound up in practices of visibility involving everything from their style of presentation on the streets to their perennial emergence in newscasts and newspapers as objects of pity. In parallel to my last research trip, I became involved in a project supporting the initiative of street kids to take a more direct role in producing visual representations from their lives. [Some of the results from the Saling Memotret project can be accessed from my web page here.] I look forward to continuing and expanding this work in the future.

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My current research project, Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in China's Capital, examines the social role of visual art and competing ideas of aesthetic, cultural, and market value in reform-era China, with a particular focus on how gender shapes Chinese contemporary art worlds. As part of my fieldwork, I curated Cruel/Loving Bodies, an exhibit of Chinese feminist artists. I'm also working on two ethnographic videos: Jing Jing Hair Salon (with Thomas Chang and Fu Xiaoxing) about three hair salon workers, including two migrant women from the countryside, in a Beijing neighborhood on the verge of urban redevelopment; and Long March to Lugu Lake (with James Tweedie) about a group of Chinese feminist artists as they travel to a matrilineal minority village in Yunnan province to participate in an art happening with American feminist artist Judy Chicago.

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