Entitled: “Laboring through uncertainty: an ethnography of the Chinese state, labor NGOs, and development,” Darcy’s PhD dissertation investigates how international development projects supporting labor activism work in contemporary China. Foregrounding the notion of uncertainty, Darcy studies how state control is exercised by examining a specific logic of practices, discourses, and a mode of existence that constantly mask and unmask the state. More specifically, the study explores how uncertainty about the boundaries of permissible activism is generative of a sociopolitical realm in which variously positioned subjects mobilize around the idea of the state, which in turn leads to articulations and practices conducive to both self-censorship and a contingent space of activism.
