Na Fu is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at New School for Social Research. Her research interest is in migration, spatiality, and production in inequality in China. Her dissertation research focuses on transforming scales of production under the platform economies in China, in order to understand the changing dynamic on social identity and spatial divides.

How is a mask, a shoe, or a car being produced globally, and how is the assemblage of globalization in production developing? This ethnography research follows a network of factories to understand the scales of production, and how being transformed according to the implementation of smart production (SP) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs). Such changes in connections are restructuring the relationship between the human body and machine, collective and individual data reasoning, and human interactions. Three scales are under research, including 1) Networked production and smart production that are interconnected and correspond to one another. 2) The story of glue as a metaphor, which generates the discussion of “in -betweenness.” 3) The scale of state and market relations for industry upgrading implementation. Na has conducted one year of ethnographic fieldwork in factory and workshops in China, with preliminary fieldwork from 2017 and 2018, and will begin writing her dissertation in Fall 2021.