Dr. Haiyan Huang
Assistentin / PostDoc
Philosophisch-Historische Fakultät
Departement Gesellschaftswissenschaften
FG Ren

Assistentin / PostDoc

Urban Studies
Hebelstrasse 3
4056 Basel
Schweiz

haiyan.huang@unibas.ch

Dr. Haiyan Huang is a cultural anthropologist with a special focus on East Asian societies. She received trainings in (socio)linguistics in both China and the UK for her Bachelor’s and masters’ degrees. In her PhD project, she worked on queer organising in China (Between revolution and capitulation: an ethnography of everyday queer worldmaking in the Chinese city Hangzhou) at Ghent University, Belgium. She specializes in creative ethnographic research methods. With her deep interests in everyday defiance and space-making, Haiyan joined the SNF Starting Grant Aspirational Urbanism and the Recodification of Defiance (ASPIRA) as a postdoc researcher in May 2025. Led by Prof. Dr. Julie Ren, ASPIRA explores the cruelty of hope and ways of recognizing aesthetic possibilities in the face of inevitability. It engages with cities like Hong Kong and Taipei, and the practice of urban theorizations at the very small scale.

cultural anthropology, urban geography, (creative) ethnographic methodologies, queer studies

China, East Asia, Europe