Hairong Yan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UIUC. She has conducted research on rural-to-urban labor migration in China, particularly young rural women working as domestics for urban households. In the book manuscript that grew out of this research, she analyzed how development in China has radically reorganized relationships between state and market, countryside and city, mental and manual work, and gender and domesticity. She is particularly interested in understanding how these transformations have been enabled by the post-socialist epistemic shift that reorganizes the narratives of history, remaps the national territorial body (e.g. the restructuring of rural-urban relations and the emergence of vast regional disparities), and remolds subjectivity. The field research experiences and the continued process of learning about struggles on the ground have taught her the dynamic and dead-serious meanings of "the political" in open-ended social terrains, which institutionalized knowledge production often pretends to subsume and administer. This has significantly challenged and transformed her own subject positions as student, teacher, and intellectual.