Lisa Richaud
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Lisa Richaud holds a PhD in anthropology from the Université libre de Bruwelles. She has held fellowships awarded by the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Her first monograph, Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Maoist Performance Culture in Beijing's Public Parks, will be out with Amsterdam University Press in 2025. She has explored various social phenomena in contemporary urban China, including online, humorous reappropriations of propaganda slogans; afterlives of Maoist “revolutionary singing”; public space and sociality; affective experiences of the city among precarious rural migrants; suppression and expression of negative affects in a context of State-led promotion of positivity. Common to her exploration of these various themes is an ethnographic sensibility to forms of distance and detachment inherent to the modes of engagement under scrutiny – playfulness, irony, or casualness toward propagandistic language; detachment from prescribed modes of subjectivity, from the heroic socialist subject of Maoist propaganda to the normative “aspiring” entrepreneurial selves of the Reform era.
In September 2025, Lisa Richaud joins the Paris IAS for a ten-month research stay.
Research topics
Anthropology of Contemporary China; Sociality; Affect; Urban Public Spaces; Neoliberal Subjectivity.
Everyday Practices of Detachment in Contemporary China: Cultivating ‘Low
Desire’ and Refusing Work in the Era of the “Chinese Dream"
In recent years, exhausting labor conditions, rising unemployment, and authoritarian politics have shaped the everyday affective experiences of Chinese citizens, eroding their willingness to “struggle” (fendou) and accept the precarious present for the sake of brighter individual futures. When calls to “Lying flat” (tangping) circulated online in 2021, this movement suggested a detachment from the so far accepted quest for economic success, as does a growing trend of refusing work among members of the middle- and under-class alike. Multivalent in their forms and tones, new claims to purposeless, present-oriented modes of being in the world are significant in a context where the Party-state’s promotion of the “Chinese Dream” institutes individual aspirations to wealth and entrepreneurship as normative imperatives intertwined with the future of the nation. But while scholars have looked at online expressions of disillusionment and disengagement, how individuals cease to perform “desiring”, “striving” subjects, if only temporarily, remain either overlooked or romanticized as resistance.
This project makes a case for a more nuanced approach, bringing a literature on detachment in anthropology and cognate disciplines in dialogue with the study of everyday, precarious experiences and labor-induced fatigue under global capitalism. Through three research axes, it inquires into the modes and time-spaces through which people from different social groups cultivate detachment from state-promoted regimes of aspiration, and how the state and the market respond to these new trends. The project combines ethnography with close analysis of cinematographic and literary works to contribute to a multidisciplinary body of work on affect, subjectivity, and the present and future in China and beyond. Ultimately, it explores the possibility to regard detachment as a global structure of feeling.
Key publications
Lisa Richaud. Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Maoist Performance Culture in Beijing's Public Parks, Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming.
Lisa Richaud. "Malaise of Indolence: (Dis)Engagements with the Future among Young Migrants in Shanghai", Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, vol. 50, n° 3, pp. 332-352, 2022.
Lisa Richaud. "Introduction: The Politics of Negative Affects in Post-Reform China", HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 11, no. 3, p. 901-914, 2021.
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