尼古拉斯·巴特利特

I am an anthropologist of China with training in medical anthropology and psychoanalysis. My research interests include addiction and recovery, 劳动, 体现, 确有其事, 公民社会, 精神分析实践与理论, and the politics of transmitting psychological knowledge.

我的第一本书， Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China (University of California and Columbia Weatherhead 2020), offers a phenomenological account of long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction in a tin mining city. Members of this generational cohort felt stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, encountering a world that no longer resembled either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. In navigating fraught wedding rituals, performing compulsory 劳动 and emulating later-arriving entrepreneurs, individuals attempting to “return to society” elucidate shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.

My new research explores the introduction of group relations conferences (GRCs) to China. 在战后英国开创先河, GRCs teach participants to become better leaders by recognizing and responding to unconscious group processes. In group events designed to provoke phantasy and conflict, everything from geopolitical tensions to intimate dreams is made available for attendees to connect, 批判, 并反思. My fieldwork in staff and member roles at conferences and in visits to workplaces explores how the negotiation of meanings in and around GRCs contributes to imagining authority and collective life in contemporary China and beyond. I am also co-editing a special issue re-appraising China’s long 1980s and participating in a col劳动ative book project exploring affective intensities of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I did my undergraduate degree at Pomona College and studied and worked in international public health before completing my PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and UCSF. 在来十大电竞游戏综合排名之前, I taught anthropology courses at USC and UCLA and was a research analyst candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. 我教的课程包括文化, Mental 健康 and Healing in East Asia, 探讨欲望的研讨会, 劳动, 和方法在中国, 身体与社会, 和接近创伤. I co-chair Columbia’s Modern China Seminar and am affiliated with the medical anthropology track at Barnard.