Jiahui Zeng is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), Vienna. She is expected to receive her PhD in Sociology from Tsinghua University in 2026. During her doctoral training, she was a visiting student at the University of Toronto. She received her MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in social anthropology and her BA from Fudan University in Chinese literature.
Jiahui’s research lies at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, and the anthropology of capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Indonesia, she examines extractivism, industrialisation, labour, infrastructure, and socio-environmental change. Her doctoral dissertation explores the political economy and political ecology of Indonesia’s recent nickel boom, analysing how mineral extraction and industrial expansion have reshaped landscapes, livelihoods, and state–society relations in eastern Indonesia.
Beyond academia, she writes on Indonesian politics and society for public audiences. She has contributed commentary to Inside Indonesia, appeared on podcasts on Southeast Asia and Global China, and co-founded Glass House Press to introduce Southeast Asian literature to Chinese readers.
