Dr. Shichang Duan is a postdoc working in the Anthropology Department, University of Amsterdam and afflicted with ERC project China White. His current project investigates the Chinese transnational e-commerce platforms, such as Alibaba and Shein, which is based on long term ethnography among Chinese wig sellers.
He obtained his PhD in May 2023 with the dissertation titled, “Reproducing Farmers: The labor divisions among live e-commerce teammates in rural China.” Based on one-year ethnographic research as a live streamer, his dissertation investigates the platformization in rural China and the social relationship among platform workers.
From December 2021 to September 2023, he was a visiting scholar at Utrecht University, hosted by the focus area Governing the Digital Society in the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. He was also a research fellow at the Medien Der Kooperation project, University of Siegen, Germany, from April to September 2023. His works could be found on Chinese journal of communication, and Sociologia Della Comunicazione.