Affiliate Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington & National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow | Seattle
As an anthropologist and China specialist, Jing Xu’s work seeks to answer this central question: How do we become moral persons in socio-cultural contexts? Interested in culture-mind interaction, she adopts an interdisciplinary approach that puts anthropological and psychological theories in conversation, combines ethnography, experiments and data science methods, and draws from the broad field of Chinese studies. Her book The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford University Press, 2017), based on fieldwork in Shanghai, integrates ethnography and experiments to examine preschool children’s moral development under China’s one-child policy and a widely perceived societal “moral crisis.”
Recently, her book was translated into Chinese (East China Normal University Press, 2021). Her current project turns to moral development and gender in rural Taiwan under authoritarian martial law in the Cold War era. In this project she integrates ethnographic and data science methods to examine a precise set of textual records, data collected in the world’s first anthropological research of ethnic Chinese children.
She completed post-doctoral training in experimental psychology at the University of Washington, focusing on prosocial development in infancy. Her research has been published in venues spanning multiple disciplines, such as American Anthropologist, China Review International, Developmental Psychology, Ethos, PLoS One, Cross-Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review, and Sociological Review of China. Originally from China, she holds a B.A. and M.A. from Tsinghua University (Beijing), and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis (2014).
News Article: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007294
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/jingxu/home
Twitter: @XuJing_Sea