Wenjia Zhou

Wenjia Zhou is a Research Fellow (PhD Candidate) at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. Her research explores socio-material entanglements between human and more-than-human beings, with a current focus on milk production and consumption in China as part of the ERC-funded MidWay project.

Her educational background includes:

• M.Phil. in Gender Studies, University of Oslo, Norway (2018)
• M.A. in Gender Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (2013)
• B.A. in Broadcasting and Television Journalism, Fudan University, China (2012)

Dr. Zhou's research spans gender studies, anthropology, and environmental humanities through interdisciplinary approaches including ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and feminist technoscience studies. Her current work examines milk as a diverse socio-material assemblage co-constituted by cows, fodder, milking practices, and human technologies across Chinese contexts. She investigates how milk becomes liquid, powder, or emulsion through entanglements of human and nonhuman actors, challenging naturalized understandings of food substances.

Her scholarly output centers on Chinese socio-cultural dynamics, exemplified by her 2023 Bulletin Texte article analyzing paradoxical discourses in Chinese sex education that simultaneously acknowledge sex as beautiful while discouraging sexual activity. This work reflects her broader methodological commitment to exposing tensions between official narratives and lived experiences in contemporary China.

As a core researcher in the European Research Council's MidWay project, Zhou conducts multi-sited ethnography at a Hebei Province dairy farm to probe sufficiency in food systems. Her fieldwork integrates feminist STS with environmental humanities to document how sustainability emerges through complex human-animal-technological relations.

Zhou actively disseminates findings through academic conferences including AAS-in-Asia and International Symposium for STS Young Scholars, where she presents on topics like 'The naughty cow and the heartless dzomo' and 'Tasting milk, tasting modernity,' bridging scholarly analysis with public engagement on China's evolving food cultures.