Sharon Qiu
Sharon Qiu
Graduate Lecturer
Governance, Informal Sector, Shortage, Socialism, Time and Space, Cuba, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Sharon Qiu is a PhD Candidate with research focuses on Cuba. In her early career life, Qiu studied rural Shanghainese elders' living situation in senior care homes. Between 2018 and 2025, she conducted intermittent fieldwork in Santiago de Cuba, Camagüey, and Havana. As a Chinese, Qiu is interested in Cuba because it shares asynchronous popular responses with China under similar political configurations, regardless of ethnicity, geography, languages, and other cultural differentiations in the two socialist countries. More specifically, through ethnographies, she looks into Cuban people's post-revolutionary livelihood by studying the second economy and the rationing system. Qiu teaches undergraduate courses for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in Mason.
Courses Taught
ANTH 312: Political Anthropology
ANTH 302: Peoples and Cultures of Latin America
ANTH 114: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Education
M.A. in Anthropology, Louisiana State University
B.L. in Sociology, Shanghai University of Political Science and Law
Recent Presentations
2025 "How Bodies Respond to Impoverishment: los Buscos, Inventas, y Qué se Puso" at Annual Congress of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), San Francisco, CA
2024 “The Expansion of Living Struggles: Searching for Alternatives on the Plazas” at Annual Meeting of Cultural Studies Association (CSA), Online
2023 "Governance, Rituality, and Waithood of Public Life in Post-socialist Cuba" at Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)& Société canadienne d'anthropologie/the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), Toronto, Canada
2023 "To the End of the Line: Economic Transition, Tourism, and Everyday Waiting in Cuba" at 47th Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA), US Virgin Islands at St. Croix, the United States of America
2019 "Parque Céspedes: Tourism and Market in Post-revolutionary Cuba" at Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)& Société canadienne d'anthropologie/the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), Vancouver BC, Canada