Much of my research on China has focused on the last four decades of radical transformations under the increasing influence of global capitalist forces and technocratic structures of governance. My latest book—entitled Chinese Village Life Today. Building Families in an Age of Transition (Univ. of Washington Press, 2021)—paints a richly detailed portrait of recent changes shaping the conduct of everyday life in Chinese rural communities. It is based on more than twenty years of ethnographic field research with a rural community in South China, following the movements of villagers across rural-urban boundaries. The book explores the increasing power of technocratic frameworks of governance in rural China, showing how these powerful forces are shaping the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to popular religion, personal hygiene, and public sanitation. 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 modernization.

I am the co-editor of two books that explore questions of family change and societal transformation. These two books are widely used in courses on contemporary China and include: Transforming Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017, co-edited with S. Harrell) and Chinese Kinship (Routledge, 2009, co-edited with S. Brandtstadter). Beyond China, I am interested in comparative questions, and I have co-edited two journal special issues proposing innovative inter-Asian comparative approaches: one focusing on love, marriage, and intimate citizenship in China and India (Modern Asian Studies, 2016), the other on the history of childbirth medicalization in China and Japan (Technology and Culture, 2020). My research highlights the diversity of frameworks of knowledge, technology, and morality shaping the fabric of everyday life in China and other Asian contexts, and this focus on multiple forms of knowing and doing things is linked to my interest in science studies and critical STS scholarship. My first book – entitled A Escola de Antropologia de Coimbra (The Anthropological School of Coimbra) (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005) – illustrates my engagement with the field of STS. In this book, I focus on the little-known history of the discipline of Anthropology in Portugal, drawing on the notion of “world anthropologies” to make the case that a truly global history of the discipline needs to pay more attention to forms of anthropological knowledge that are produced outside the dominant centres of anthropological production. 

My research has been awarded over 10 grants as PI or Co-PI from major national and international funding institutions, including the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, Hong Kong Research Grants Council, American Council of Learned Societies and British Academy. I am in the editorial board of a number of distinguished journals, including Antropologia Portuguesa, Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. In 2018-2019, I was awarded a Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to develop a research project on the medicalization of birth in contemporary China. In 2021-2022, I curated the international colloquium, “Pluralizing the Anthropocene. Reenvisioning the Future of the Planet in the 21st Century”, supported by Fundação Serralves. I am also very active as a podcaster and science communicator.