Yue Du
Credentials: China
Address:
2013 SKJ Fellow

Yue Du is a PhD student in sociology. She got both her bachelor and master degrees in sociology from Peking University. In summer 2010, while she studied the newest mode of urbanization of China in a district in Chengdu, she found that while the traditional and fierce peasant protests didn’t break out as frequently as in the former mode of urbanization, the life of the peasants was not ameliorated as promised, and potential strategies of a different kind of protest were looming. What’s the nature of this different kind of protest? Could it protect the peasants when faced with an increasingly deceptive logic of the capital which secretly took advantage of the urbanization process? This summer she will use the SKJ pre-dissertation award to travel to Chengdu, carrying out in-depth interviews with local governors, agri-business managers and peasants, and doing ethnographic observations while living among the peasants, to further the understanding of this alternative approach of protest and collect data for her dissertation.