Sheng Long is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council of East Asian Studies at the Macmillan Center and Lecturer in Anthropology Department at Yale. Her research integrates ethnographic, linguistic, historical, and STS approaches.
Sheng Long’s work focuses on numerical governance: how people quantify farmland, vegetation, and weather in ways that resonate with urban-rural development disparities and social stratification in statistical engagement. Her first manuscript project, Numbering Land: Ethical Measures of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms, is an ethnography of geographic and legal data in national reforms and everyday agriculture. It examines the contribution and vulnerability of rural landholders in the state’s statistical governance of land belonging and agrarian resources. The work thematizes numbers as an unsettling actor in both routine life and techno-scientific projects, questioning the power dynamics in technologies invented by government and tech companies.
Before joining Yale, Sheng Long was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Lecturer in Anthropology Department at Columbia University. She received PhD from Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research has been supported by Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, and Wenner-Gren Foundation.