Dr. Haiyan Huang is a cultural anthropologist with special interests in everyday practices. 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 closely works with community-based research methods. She is also actively engaged in organizing community events for Chinese diasporas and queer communities in Europe. Carrying on the interests in the potential and limitations of the mundane, the everyday, Haiyan joined the SNSF Starting Grant Aspirational Urbanism and Everyday City Life (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. Within this broad framework, Haiyan primarily focuses on examining place-making practices in independent cultural spaces, such as self-publishing and independent bookstores, in the two cities. 

• comparative urbanism
• cultural geography
• gender & queer studies

• Hong Kong
• Taiwan
• China