Her research focuses on platform capitalism, labor precarity, and the transformation of industrial production in China. She is especially interested in how digital infrastructures and state policies reshape the spatial organization of labor and deepen systemic inequalities. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include global political economy, digital governance, platform capitalism, and China’s development strategies.
She examines how digital platforms, state policies, and transnational supply chains mediate industrial relocation and restructure working lives across geographic scales, particularly through the lens of rural-urban labor mobility, decentralized workshop economies, and networked production. Her work draws on multi-sited ethnography and political economic analysis to reveal how technological shifts redistribute production geographically while intensifying precarity and inequality in ways often obscured by narratives of innovation.
Her research has been published in leading academic journals including Science, Technology, & Human Values, with her paper “QR Network Production: Reskilling Labor for Mass Customization in Shoe Supply Network from China” appearing in the special issue “Inter-Asian Techno-Capitalisms: Models, Networks, and Futures.” She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “No Way Out of the Factory,” which examines the evolving politics of labor in technologically mediated production systems.
Fu holds a Master’s degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she served as a postdoctoral research associate at the China Initiative at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
