Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Chengyu (Sunny) Tang
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Key information
Key information
- Department
- Department of Anthropology and Sociology
- Qualifications
-
BA (Royal Holloway)
MA (LSE)
MRes (SOAS) - Subject
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Thesis title
- Family and the State: The Unfinished Business of Planning and Assurance in Everyday Life in China's Urbanised Villages
- Internal Supervisors
- Dr Zerrin Özlem Biner & Professor Jieyu Liu
Biography
Sunny (Chengyu) Tang is a PhD candidate in Anthropology working at the intersection of social and political anthropology.
Her academic journey reflects a strong interdisciplinary focus on urbanisation, migration, and social inequalities in contemporary China. She began her exploration in Comparative Literature and Philosophy, where her undergraduate dissertation (awarded a distinction) analysed the interplay between Confucianism and feminist movements in shaping women’s subjectivity in modern China.
Building on this foundation, she pursued a master’s degree at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE, where one of her papers explored urban inequalities through gendered and spatial lenses. This work examined elderly women’s public dance practices in China’s urban spaces, shedding light on how gender and age intersect in negotiating access to public life.
As a co-founder of _The Bones of the House_ (gǔ liào), a London-based research collective, she integrates community art practices with ethnographic methods to document the disappearance of urban villages in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. These villages, home to migrant communities, are emblematic of China’s rapid urban transformation and are being erased through state-led demolition and redevelopment. The collective’s work archives these transitions, preserving a record of the socio-spatial and cultural changes driven by urbanisation.
Her Social Anthropology dissertation, titled _“Suspended Homes: Time Lag, Homemaking, and Urban Villages in China’s Planned Urbanisation”_ (awarded a distinction), bridges macro-level state policy with micro-level migrant experiences. The research introduces the concept of “time lag” to analyse how temporal disruptions shape domestic practices, material culture, and migratory geographies.
Praised for its methodological innovation and critical contribution to the anthropology of time in urban contexts, this work underpins her current PhD research into family economic planning and hope management in urbanised villages.
Research interests
- China
- Urbanisation
- Urban villages
- Migration
- Governance
- China's Planning System
- Everyday economy
- Inequality
- Family
- Homemaking
- Anthropology of time
- Urban planning
- Socio-economic transformation
- Cultural change
- Feminist anthropology
- Ethnographic methods
- Community art practices
