Siru Chen

Siru’s research straddles two modes — the ethnographic specificity of psychic/psychiatric terms through which youths refuse schooling in the People’s Republic of China, and the conceptual universality of the psyche and its structure. Tracking a theory of the subject in the traffic between specificity and universality, Siru asks questions about state governance and its excess, the singularity of madness, and ethico-political possibilities in contemporary China.

Siru comes from a background in anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Their primary references include psychoanalysis, poetics, queer and crip theory. As an ethnographer, Siru attunes to multimodal textures, and foregrounds the split difference between presence and absence.