Ziqi Xie

Ziqi Xie is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department. Her research interests include topics of reproduction, kinship, family, population policy, biotechnologies, governmentality, morality as well as neoliberalism. Ziqi’s research focuses on a generational cohort who has become active in birthing a second child through assisted reproductive technologies to make a new kind of “ideal family” after China’s two-child policy in 2016. Ziqi has been conducting clinic-based, lab-based, and home-based studies since 2017. Based on 21 months of fieldwork in Guangzhou, China, Ziqi’s dissertation seeks to analyze how a demographic question gets rephrased and remade into a moral question through heterogeneous and interactive engagements among the state, families, and biomedical technologies. Her research will also explore how kinship is being remade, remoralized, and gendered in families’ childbearing and childrearing practices. To learn more about Xie’s research and publications, visit her webpage.

In Spring 2024, Ziqi received a CISS Summer mini-grant to present my accepted paper titled “The Doctors’ Practices and Discourses of Suggesting Non-reproduction in Pro-natalist China” at the conference EASST-4S in the summer of 2024. This is the quadrennial joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies (4S). Based on her doctoral dissertation, this paper explicates how and why the national demographic anxiety and the pro-natalist call propagated by the state are rarely translated into IVF doctors’ clinical reasoning and practices in contemporary China, even though medical professionals are often the active agents of the state’s reproductive governance. Learn more in our featured article.