Diana Fu (University of Toronto)

How should scholars study contentious politics in illiberal regimes, where risks are high for both the researcher and the subjects? This lecture will cover how ethnographic approaches can be used to study contention across various settings.  It contends that research questions starting with “the what and the how” are just as important as the “why.”  It will give students a theoretical and practical view of how to study contention across the different types of non-Western states.  

Diana Fu is associate professor of political science at The University of Toronto, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Wilson Center, and the National-Committee on US-China Relations.  Her  research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China. She is author of the award-winning book Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge University Press, 2018).