Derek Sheridan received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown University in 2017. His research interests include China-Africa connections, migration and transnationalism, ethics, inequality, political economy, race, semiotics, knowledge production, global imaginaries, (global) China, East Africa (Tanzania), and Taiwan. His first project, Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Interpersonal Ethics of Global Inequality in Tanzania, is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork studying the everyday lives of migrant Chinese entrepreneurs in Tanzania. The book will examine how Chinese expatriates and ordinary Tanzanians negotiate the emerging interdependencies and inequalities of a “South-South relationship” through the interpersonal ethics of social interactions. A second project concerns the circulation of martial arts culture between East Asia and Africa, and its influence on subjectivities and cultural production (incl. film) in Tanzania. Derek has also done research on political imaginaries and the memory of US presence in Taiwan.
Dr. Derek Sheridan will be inducted as Assistant Fellow of Institute of Ethnology on October 1, 2018.