Dr. Jialing Luo is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the School of Public Administration, Sichuan University. She is a fellow of the RAI and a member of the EASA. After obtaining her doctoral degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, she undertook research and taught briefly at the University of Oxford. She also conducted research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Olympic Studies Centre in Switzerland. Her research interests and areas include urban spatial and social transformations, state and society, modernity and modernism, urbanisation, infrastructure and everyday life, kinship and connectedness. She has given numerous talks, lectures, and seminars on her work and has published articles, review articles, and book chapters with SSCI and A&HCI journals, as well as with Routledge and Leiden University Press. She has been awarded several research grants, such as from the Olympic Studies Centre in Switzerland and the National Social Science Fund of China. The courses she has taught include PPE (Oxford), MHP (Oxford), Social Anthropology, Applied Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Introduction to Sociological Masterworks, History of Western Political Thought，Western Social Theories, and Contemporary Chinese Social Problems. Prior to her overseas studies and work, she was also intensively involved in several development projects in China, which were managed by the World Bank, DFID, and/or the UN.