Research Interests
migration and mobility, diasporic communities, transnational elite education, political economy of global cities, community development, and Global China.
Profile
Siqi Tu is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology where she leads the development Mobility Lab (MoLab), an initiative to explore mobility as an intensification of existential concerns shaped by political economy and as a means through which people remake the world. Her individual research focuses on the global mobility of young people, transnational elite education, emerging diasporic community, and the political economy of urban and community development. She previously worked at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research at NYU Shanghai and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Her forthcoming book, Destination Diploma: How Chinese Upper-Middle Class Families ‘Outsource’ Secondary Education to the United States, examines the construction of transnational elite narratives and the uncertainties of transnationalism through the experiences of urban upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their children. Drawing on multiple qualitative methods—including content analysis of educational consulting advertisements and online materials, ethnographic observation of school recruitment workshops, and over 100 in-depth interviews with Chinese parents, students, and educational consultants—the book explores a transnational intergenerational class-making project centered on “outsourcing” elite education. It documents the identity formation, trajectories, and aspirations of teenage student migrants—the “parachute generation”—amid global uncertainties such as geopolitical tensions, rising anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Engaging a triple analytical framework of transnational elite education, the global middle class, and cross-border negotiations of citizenship and identity, the book concludes with a discussion of “fragile cosmopolitanism” as global citizenship imaginaries falter.
She collaborates with scholars worldwide to edit books and special issues that offer fresh perspectives on transnational elite education, youth migration, childhood studies in East Asia, and evolving concepts of global citizenship. Her latest project examines the quasi-exile mentality of emerging migrants—primarily cultural workers from increasingly authoritarian regimes—who create new spaces for “homeland” narratives beyond the nation-state.