special issues
2023 “The Many Faces of Protest: Rethinking Collective Action in a World of Dissent.” Sociologica: International Journal for Sociological Debate, Volume 17 (1), Co-edited with Elena Pavan.
2021 “Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory,” Special Issue of German Politics & Society, Volume 39 (1), co-edited with Benjamin Nienass.
2020 “Transformations of Shen Kong Borderlands.” Made in China Journal Forum, Volume 5 (3), co-edited with Mary Ann O’Donnell & Denise Y. Ho.
Selected articles
2024 “Provenance-Centered Reckoning: A Memory Infrastructure for the Colonial Past?” Berliner Blätter: Ethnographiche und ethnologische Beiträge (Berlin Journal for Ethnology), No. 89, pp. 43-59.
2021 “Reclaiming the New, Remaking the Local: Shenzhen at 40.” With Mary Ann O’Donnell, China Perspectives, 2021/2, 71-75.
2021 “Brand of Brothers? The Humboldt Forum and the Myths of Innocence.” German Politics & Society, 39 (1), 100-111.
2021 “Introduction: Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory.” With Benjamin Nienass, German Politics & Society, 39 (1), 1-14.
2020 “Border as Sluice: Toward a Cultural Geography of the Shen Kong Borderlands” (with Mary Ann O’Donnell), Made in China Journal, 5 (3).
2020 “The Red and the Black: China’s Social Credit System as a Total Test Environment.” The British Journal of Sociology 72 (3), pp. 489-502.
2019 “Colonial Pasts in Germany’s Present.” German Politics and Society 37(4).
2019 “What Kind of Model? Thinking about the Special Economic Zone and the Socialist City.” Made in China Journal, 4(2), pp. 72-78.
2016 “China’s Infrastructural Fix.” Limn no. 7, Special Issue on Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics, pp. 35-40.
2016 “The Berlin Wall after the Berlin Wall: Turning Site into Sight.” Memory Studies 9(1), pp. 48-62.
2015. “Collecting Communism: Private Museums of Everyday Life under Socialism in former East Germany.” German Politics and Society, 33(1-2), pp. 135-145.
2013 “Memory Landscapes and the Labor of the Negative in Berlin.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 26(1), pp. 31-40.
2011 “Modernity and the Urban Imagination in Economic Zones.” Theory, Culture & Society, 28(5), pp. 98-122.
2011 “Shenzhen: City of Suspended Possibility.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(2), pp. 414-420.
2010 “Peasants into Citizens: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China.” Cultural Anthropology, 25(3), pp. 421-458.
2010 “Power, Secrecy, Paranoia: Technologies of Governance and the Structure of Rule.” Cultural Politics 6(3), pp. 287-302.
2004 “Link, Search, Interact: the Co-Evolution of NGOs & Interactive Technology” (with David Stark). Theory, Culture & Society, 21(3), pp. 101-117.
2002 “Innovative Ambiguities: NGOs’ use of Interactive Technology in Eastern Europe” (with David Stark). Studies in Comparative and International Development, 37(2), pp. 3-23.
2002 “’The Taste Remains’: Consumption, (N)ostalgia and the Production of East Germany.” Public Culture, 14(3), pp. 545-556.
2002 “The New Spirit of German Geopolitics” (with Susanne Peters). Geopolitics, 7(3), pp. 1-18.
Selected book chapters
2023 “Memory Activism between Ownership and Appropriation.” Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg, eds., New York: Routledge.
2022 “Material Culture and the Socialist Uncanny in Mao’s China.” In Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho, eds., University of Washington Press.
2021 “Material Culture and the Emergence of Ostalgie” (“Materielle Kultur und die Entstehung der „Ostalgie“: Die Bedeutung von Alltagsobjekten in der Erinnerung an der DDR”) (In German). In Monica Rüthers, editor, “Gute Erinnerungen an böse Zeiten – Nostalgie in ‘posttotalitären’ Erinnerungsdiskursen nach 1945 und 1989,” Munich: Walter de Gruyter, Schriften des Historisches Kollegs 6, 117-126.
2020 “Merit, Morality, and Market: The Chinese Social Credit Experiment” in David Stark, ed., The Performance Complex: Competitions and Valuations in Social Life. Oxford University Press.
2020 “Spaces of Informal Production in China” (with Stefan Al). In Nina Rappaport and Robert Lane, eds., The Design of Urban Manufacturing. Routledge, pp. 151-160.
2020 “Berlin’s Empty Centre: A Double Take.” In Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski, eds., Re-Centring the City: Urban Mutations, Socialist Afterlives, and the Global East, University College London Press, pp. 79-89.
2020 “Introduction: Notes towards a political morphology of undead urban forms” (with Michal Murawski). In Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski, eds.,Re-Centring the City: Urban Mutations, Socialist Afterlives, and the Global East, University College London Press, pp.1-14.
2017 “Objects” (with Cristina Cuevas-Wolf and Dani Kranz). In Andrew S. Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding et al., Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground. Berghahn Publishers, pp. 113-142.
2015 “Object Lessons: Tactility and Visuality in Museums of the Socialist Everyday.” In Peter McIssac and Gabriele Muller, eds., Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization. University of Toronto Press, pp. 123-137.
2014 “Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia in former East Germany.” In Olivia Ange and David Berliner, eds., Anthropology and Nostalgia. Berghahn Publishers, pp. 123-138.
2010 “Remittances, Gender, and Development.” In Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan, eds., Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances. Second Edition, Routledge, pp. 129-142.
Please see the individual entries in the Research section for more publications.