Aihwa Ong


Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.
Her major works include Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, and the edited volume Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.

Life and career

Ong received her B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College and earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. She was visiting lecturer at Hampshire College before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. She was the Chair of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley ; was Visiting Professor at City University of Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at Yonsei University, and a senior researcher at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship and has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation for the Social Science Research Council. She received the Cultural Studies Book Award for Flexible Citizenship from the Association for Asian American Studies as well as a prize from the American Ethnological Society. She received honorable mention for Buddha is Hiding from the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational Anthropology. In 2007, Ong was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos. She was the Chair of the US National Committee for Pacific Science Association from 2009-2011, and was named Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology in 2015. She continues to teach, publish, and lecture internationally.

Academic work

Aihwa Ong's work deals with particular entanglements of politics, technology, ethics and affects in rapidly changing situations on the Asia Pacific rim. Ong approaches research from vantage points outside or athwart the United States. This angle of inquiry unsettles and troubles stabilized viewpoints and units of analysis in the social sciences, such as gender, class, citizenship, cities, sovereignty and the nation-state.
As an anthropologist, Ong employs ethnographic observation and analytical concept-work to investigate diverse subjective and institutional effects of the global on emerging situations for ways of being human today. From the novel freedoms and accompanying restrictions experienced by Malaysian female workers in multinational factories to the accumulative strategies of Asian entrepreneurs in relocating family and capital overseas; from the disciplining of Cambodian refugees towards an embrace of American values to the neoliberal reasoning and graduated modes of governing at work; from the transformation of cities to the rise of contemporary art in Asia; Ong's work tracks the interplay of global forces and everyday practices as they crystallize into myriad and uneven contexts for human living and belonging in modernity.
Her current work focuses on regimes of governing, technology, and culture that shape new meanings and practices of the human in an emerging global region. Her field research shifts between Singapore and China in order to track emerging global hubs for biotechnical experiments with genomic science in contemporary East Asia.

Publications

Books and edited volumes