Biography
Guolin Gu is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. Before entering graduate school in Hong Kong and then in the United States, she worked as a project manager in a China-based NGO on women’s empowerment and sustainable development in rural villages. Her research interests also center on rural development with a regional focus on China. Specifically, she studies how Chinese villagers themselves understand government-driven expropriation of agricultural land for industrial and commercial development, by looking at land-related village politics, villagers’ livelihood strategies, as well as their physical and subjective well-being. More broadly, she is interested in how ordinary people experience, resist, and/or adapt to structural changes while thinking critically about what “development” means for rural people and the role of scholars in promoting meaningful “development.” Her master’s thesis, “Rethinking dispossession,” was just published in the Journal of Agrarian Change.