Dr. Cheuk Ka-Kin recently joined as a lecturer (assistant professor) in anthropology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. Previously he was an assistant professor in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong, teaching and research fellows at Universiteit Leiden, NYU Shanghai, and Rice University.

On February 28, 2022, Dr. Cheuk delivered a presentation titled “Foreigner Management in a Marginal Hub: A County-View from Southeast China”, to unpack the everyday working of foreigner management in Keqiao at Zhejiang Province. Keqiao is an international trading hub that, rather contrastively, goes hand in hand with its marginal administrative status as a county-level district. Chiefly drawing on fieldwork that he started in 2009, the presentation captured the variegated and changing ways in which Keqiao’s non-leading, frontline bureaucrats dealt with the South Asian diasporic traders who frequently came to them for immigration-related matters, such as visa renewals. It illustrated how the bureaucrats (re)produced their own policy sensibilities in these encounters, which generated bottom-up knowledge in contouring and consolidating the pro-migration governance in Keqiao. Nonetheless, as the presentation also showed, such consolidation continued to be undermined by the top-down immigration reforms and pandemic governance, which had become increasingly intensified in recent years.

Having conducted fieldwork over the last 17 years on the Sikh diaspora in Hong Kong and on Indian traders in southeast China, Dr. Cheuk is currently developing a new project on the transnational flower industry and environmental ethics in China and Scotland. His recent scholarly publications include “Funny Money Circulation and Fabric Exports from China to Dubai through Indian Trading Networks” (American Behavioral Scientist 66, 2022), “Diasporic Convergence, Sustained Transience and Indifferent Survival: Indian Traders in China” (History and Anthropology, 2022), “Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods in the Time of COVID-19: Virtual Fieldtrips, a Web Symposium, and Public Engagement with Asian American Communities in Houston, Texas” (Teaching and Learning Anthropology 4:1, 2021), “Making Mumbai (in China)” (in Lisa Björkman, ed., Bombay Brokers, Duke University Press, 2021), and “Inter-Asian Hinduism through the Material Lens in East Asian Diasporic Nodes” (In Knut Jacobsen, ed., The Oxford Handbook for Hinduism, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Dr. Cheuk has been active in academic conferences. In the 2022 Spring, he was invited to present “Funny Money Circulation and Fabric Exports From China to Dubai Through Indian Trading Networks” at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Science, University of Hong Kong and at the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University (a brief report about the talk is available here). In the 2022 Fall, he presented an updated version of the paper “Money Circulations and Fabric Exports from China to Dubai through Indian Diasporic Connections” at the Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, and the Hong Kong Anthropological Society. He was a keynote speaker and a discussant for the conference “In and Out of South Asia: Race, Capitalism, and Mobility” at the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan. Dr. Cheuk also convened several seminars for his courses and department in Hong Kong, including a public lecture, “Immigration through Generations: Stories from the Houston Asian American Archive” given by Dr. Anne Chao (Rice University).

In the past, Dr. Cheuk was one of the first batches of ICI Emerging Scholars and has contributed a working paper to the ICI Working Paper Series (which has been downloaded for near 1,800 times since 2012!). Most recently, he was invited to present at the inaugural Biennial Conference on China-India Studies on January 13-14, 2023, which was co-organized by the Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS; Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai; Global China Center, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Harvard-Yenching Institute; and India China Institute, The New School.

In his free time, Dr. Cheuk likes traveling around, watching both local and global, basketball and soccer games, and spending time with families and friends.