Mr Shaoyu Tang

PhD Student

shaoyu@connect.hku.hk

8.25, 8/F., The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus

Biography

Shaoyu Tang is a full-time PhD student at HKU sociology. He is supervised by Professor Sylvia Martin and Professor Victor Shin (co-supervisor). Before coming to HKU, he studied chemical engineering and Chinese literature at Sichuan university and was trained to be an interdisciplinary scholar in humanities and social science at New York University XE center.

Shaoyu has a quite broad research interest in many anthropological fields. He studied indigenous knowledge and grassland degradation on Tibetan Plateau and has served as a core volunteer for a local grassroots conservation NGO there for years. His Master’s project interrogates the changing values and morals of China’s middle-class urban youth through closely examining their usage of the word success (Chenggong) in everyday lives. In doctoral work ahead, he intends to picture the changing landscape of China’s cultural and affective politics with an ethnographic focus on the rising comedy industry.