Anzi Dong is a transborder activist, scholar, and teacher. Her research triangulates grassroots feminisms, class politics, and social movements in mainland China, Hong Kong, and other diasporic spaces. In 2024, she completed her PhD at Arizona State University in gender studies with an emphasis on community engagement. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Anzi’s interdisciplinary research sheds light on grassroots feminist resistance and queer kinship formations in a non-Western neoliberal authoritarian context. While at Rice, Anzi will develop her dissertation into a book manuscript, Caring Enough to Act: Migrant Women's Community Organizing and the Culture of Working-Class Feminist Solidarity in Neoliberal South China, which engages in migrant woman-led community activism through participatory action research. Interweaving archival studies with feminist ethnography, Anzi’s work traces the processes through which a group of migrant women workers, who are rendered as disposable factory labor force by “Made in China” global supply chains, step into their own power and animate a radical praxis of community thriving to confront structural abandonment. Her work illustrates both the neoliberal authoritarian formulation of state care in China and alternative means of living a democratic feminist life beyond the harsh grip of state care. These alternatives refuse translation into hegemonic epistemic frameworks of Western democracy.

Anzi will also work on her second research project, Queering “Made in China.” It draws upon rich scholarly conversations on racial capitalism and social reproduction to build transnational abolitionist queer thinking. Grounded in Global South historical experiences, this project situates Chinese workers’ alternative kinship formations and queer sociality within the “Made in China” carceral factory geography. Against the spectacle of US-China imperialist rivalry, Anzi’s research dissects the racialized queer tissues connecting the political economies of the US and China while charting the possibilities of building solidarity among differentially marginalized social groups from both countries. Ultimately, Anzi’s work is dedicated to furthering Global-South-to-North dialogues on reimagining ungovernable feminist queer life and transborder collectivity in the present moment of neoliberal authoritarian globalization.

Anzi’s scholarship, activism, and teaching are informed by her extensive experiences in campus-based LGBTQ+ and feminist student organizing in mainland China, community collaboration with a trans-queer migrant grassroots organization in Phoenix, Arizona, and her ongoing efforts to advance Chinese migrant workers’ community initiatives. Anzi will continue her commitment to doing solidarity work with grassroots communities in Houston, Texas.