People
Teaching Faculty

Prof. WU Ka Ming

Associate Professor

Ph.D. (Anthropology), Columbia University
M. Phil. (Anthropology), Columbia University.
M. Phil. (Gender Studies/Government and Public Administration), CUHK

Venue

KKB 224
Email
kamingwu@cuhk.edu.hk
Phone

3943-4274

About Prof. WU Ka Ming

Wu Ka-ming is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for China Studies. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her work is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of cultural studies, anthropology, China studies, and environmental humanities. Ka-ming’s research can be broadly conceptualized around three interrelated strands. The first examines state, culture, and citizen-making, with a focus on nationalism, gender, volunteering, and socialist cultural politics. Her forthcoming book Everyday Urbanism in Contemporary China (LUP 2026) explores how state mobilization, urban infrastructure, and volunteering practices shape civic imaginaries in non-liberal contexts.

Ka-ming’s most recent work develops a concept of plastic modernity in China. Funded by the Hong Kong Government’s General Research Fund, her project investigates plastic products, technologies, advertising, and consumption from the 1960s to the 1990s across Hong Kong and mainland China. This research will culminate in a book on a brief history of plastic in modern China and a forthcoming journal article, “Plastic in Modern China: from the mundane shoes to the sublime little red book.” Together, these works theorize plastic as a key material through which modernity, technology and design, and everyday life were reconfigured in socialist and post-socialist China.

Ka-ming’s earlier research centers on waste, class and urban China. Through ethnographic and historical inquiry, she approaches waste and discarded materials as socially and politically active, rather than merely technical problems. Her award-winning book (co-author) Living with Waste (CUP 2017) and related journal publications have established her as a leading humanities scholar of waste, sustainability, and urban inequality in China and Hong Kong. She is now Editor-in-Chief of the journal Worldwide Waste.

Ka-ming’s first ethnographic research took place in rural Yan’an, northwestern part of China in early 2000 where she developed her interest in the intersection of representations and practices of folk culture, socialist governance and urbanization. Her book monograph Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism (UIP 2015) argues the nature of cultural production in China today can be thought in terms of a “hyper folk,’ in which ritual practices, performances, heritage, craft productions, and other reenactments of the traditional can no longer be viewed as either simulations or authentic originals, but a field where a whole range of social contests and changes are being negotiated.

Beyond academic research, Ka-ming is actively engaged in public scholarship and knowledge transfer on sustainability, serving as Director of the Centre for Social Innovation Studies under the Hong Kong Institute of Asia Pacific Studies of CUHK. She has led projects such as Plastic-free Hong Kong , Plastic-free Together and Best with Less: the Hong Kong Tertiary Sustainable Packaging Design Competition, which engaged students in fieldwork, design thinking, exhibitions, and collaboration with communities, NGOs, and industry partners. Through these initiatives, Ka-ming rethinks the role of humanities scholarship in sustainability education and develops pedagogies oriented toward public engagements and ecological futures. Her goal is to establish as a critical cultural studies scholar on sustainability, making research and pedagogical interventions in our current poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequalities.

Everyday Urbanism in Contemporary China

Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations

This book examines how Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight surveillance regime through volunteering. It asks how citizens connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research, the author investigates how citizens conduct volunteer activities that not only promote party-state campaigns and engage with new urban spaces and services, but also experiment with political, social, and cultural rights, including advocating for the rights of people with disabilities and promoting unofficial interpretations of national history. The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice through which citizens navigate existing hierarchies of urban and rural status, gender, age, and ability, while contesting top-down, mega-event–driven urbanization. It situates Chinese everyday urbanism within the context of China’s hosting of multiple international events, its expanding public and digital infrastructures, heightened party-state control, and burgeoning digital activism. The book contributes to the infrastructural turn in urban anthropology and the field of China studies, offering a new understanding of urban rights and public access in contemporary China.

廢品生活

垃圾場的經濟、社群與空間

胡嘉明、張劼穎
Bordertown Thinker Series
The Chinese University Press

Through a series of ethnographic investigations, this book presents and interprets the lived experiences of waste workers in Beijing amid rapid economic transformation. By conceptualizing garbage as a material agent in socio-political relations, it explores how waste organically participates in China’s processes of social transformation—where class fragmentation, policy barriers, urban–rural economic and cultural disparities, the mobility of migrant labor, and the urban–rural divide are intricately entangled.

Reinventing Chinese Tradition

The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

An eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China

The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions.

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