Shuxuan Zhou (Ph.D. 2017) has received continued recognition for her book From Forest Farm to Sawmill: Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State (University of Washington Press, 2024). Drawing on more than two decades of ethnographic research, oral histories, and archival materials, Zhou traces the lives of forestry workers in northern Fujian, China, from the Mao era through the post-socialist period.
The book has been praised in multiple leading journals. In The China Journal, reviewer Tamara Jacka described it as “a rich and readable ethnographic study” that highlights women’s organizing and protest while making complex processes of capital accumulation and exploitation highly accessible. More recently, Xin Huang reviewed the book in Contemporary Psychology (September 2025) commended Zhou’s “worker-centered, gendered history of forestry,” noting how her work illuminates systemic inequalities, gendered labor dynamics, and the continuity between socialist and state-capitalist systems. Both reviews highlight the book’s ethnographic depth, analytical rigor, and pedagogical value.
Zhou earned her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies in 2017. Her research continues to shed light on how gender, labor, and the state intersect in China’s historical and contemporary transformations.