Dr. Xuefei Ren has been selected as a fellow for the India China Institute of the New School

September 29, 2021

Xuefei Ren has been selected as a Fellow for the India China Institute’s International Research Seminar “Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking” in 2021-2022, hosted by the New School for Social Research in New York.

Her project is entitled “Dr. Fauci in China: Medical Authority, Policymaking, and China’s Responses to Covid-19.” She will be researching on the relationship between scientists and government authorities in China during the pandemic, with in-depth case studies of several high-profile Chinese doctors. Drawing upon media analysis, policy analysis, and interviews with Chinese doctors, Ren will examine how medical experts have influenced China’s Covid-19 prevention measures such as lockdown, “grid governance”, digital surveillance, mass testing, and border control. 

The selection committee reviewed a large number of competitive applications from scholars and practitioners around the world. She is among the four fellows selected from outside China and India. She will participate in a year-long seminar series on “Expertise and Policymaking” in the age of Covid-19 and contribute a set of publications from her project.

Dr. Ren, Associate Professor of Sociology, is a comparative urbanist whose work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment in global perspective.She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is currently working on two new projects. The first project examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban governance in six countries, including China, the United States, Canada, Germany, Brazil and South Africa. The second project compares culture-led revitalization in post-industrial cities, with Detroit, Harbin, and Turin as case studies. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been selected as a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (2021-2023). She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.