Hello, I am Gonçalo SANTOS.
I was born in Coimbra. My first name is Portuguese and is pronounced Gon-sah-loo. I am a social-cultural anthropologist interested in studies of family, gender, and intimate life and social studies of science and technology. I studied Chinese in Macau and Guangzhou and have been developing multi-sited research in China since the late 1990s. My research explores new approaches to questions of modernity, moral subjectivity, and social and technological transformation in times of increasing social and environmental uncertainties that are raising important questions about the future of human life on the planet.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
RECENT EVENTS
29 Jan 2021
Virtual Conference: “China, Unseen: Solving Problems in the New Era.” Research Group Culture and Society, U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, Georgetown University
21-24 July 2020
EASA Roundtable: “Shifting Horizons: Anthropology and STS in the 21st Century.” 16th EASA Biennial Conference EASA2020: New Anthropological Horizons in and beyond Europe, Lisbon Virtual Conference
5 July 2020
Workshop Meeting, Research Group Culture and Society, U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, Georgetown University
19 June 2020
Virtual Symposium: “COVID-19, Technoscience, and Biosecurity in the 21st Century,” Johannesburg Institute for Advance Study
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a full member of the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the University of Coimbra. I was trained as a social-cultural anthropologist at the London School of Economics and the ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra, I held faculty positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. I am the founder and the director of the international research network Sci-Tech Asia, and I am a participant in the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues Research Group on Culture and Society at Georgetown University.
My research covers a wide range of topics in contemporary China, from family and marriage to human-environment relations and moral transformation. My most recent book – entitled Chinese Village Life Today. Building Families in an Age of Transition – will be published by the University of Washington Press in 2021. This book is based on two decades of longitudinal research with a village community in South China, tracking the movements of villagers across regional and rural-urban boundaries. The book explores the increasing power of technocratic frameworks of governance in rural China, proposing an intimate account of the last four decades of changes in everyday practices of marriage and family planning, childbearing and childrearing, public sanitation and popular religion. The book explores the making of contemporary China from the perspective of marginal rural populations, highlighting the moral agency of these populations and their intimate choices as they engage with larger national and global forces of technocratic modernization.
My research has been published in leading journals such as Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Modern Asian Studies, and Technology and Culture. I am the co-editor of two books widely used in courses on contemporary China: Transforming Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017) and Chinese Kinship (Routledge, 2009). I am also the co-editor of a special issue on love, marriage, and intimate citizenship in China and India (Modern Asian Studies, 2016) and, more recently, a special section on the history of childbirth medicalization in China and Japan (Technology and Culture, 2020). My research has received awards and grants from major international organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the British Academy, the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. In 2019-2020, I received a Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to develop a research project on the increasing medicalization of birth in contemporary China.