Jing Xu

Grant Type

Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship

Institutional Affiliation

Washington, U. of

Grant number

Gr. 10386

Approve Date

October 11, 2022

Project Title

Xu, Jing (Washington, U. of) "“Unruly” Children: Moral Development in a Taiwanese Village (1958-1960)"

JING XU, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and writing on ““Unruly” Children: Moral Development in a Taiwanese Village (1958-1960).” How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), answers these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children. The work skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs’ extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic interpretation, natural language processing, and machine-learning techniques. Through a lens of social cognition, this book unravels the complexities of children’s moral growth, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics. Writing through and about fieldnotes, this study connects the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously. Besides this monograph, the grantee worked on journal articles and book chapters. These publications and work-in-progress articles span venues across multiple fields, e.g., anthropology, psychology, and general science, feature diverse methodologies, e.g., ethnography, statistical modeling, and social network analysis, and highlight various topics ranging from cultural evolution to intellectual history.

Publications

Xu, Jing (2024) “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village Cambridge University Press, (In production) Xu, Jing (2024) “Learning Moral Norms: ‘Cultural Models’ in Children’s Eyes.” In Giovanni Bennardo, Victor de Munck, Stephen Chrisomalis, eds., Cognition in and out of the Mind: Cultural Models Theory. Palgrave-McMillan. Forthcoming (May 2024) Xu, Jing (2024)“Children at the Margins: Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives about Mid-20th Century Chinese Childhoods.” In Isabella Jackson & Yushu Geng eds., Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History. Routledge. Forthcoming. Xu, Jing, et al. (2023) Demographic factors impact children’s moral development in postwar Taiwan: Modeling naturalistic observations from historical texts.” Scientific Reports. Revise & Resubmit. Xu, Jing (2023) “Rediscovering ‘the Child’: A Re-interpretation of Arthur & Margery Wolf’s Classic Fieldnotes.” Sociological Review of China (5): 65-88. (in Chinese).  《重新发现“儿童”: 对武雅士和卢蕙馨经典田野资料再阐释》,《社会学评论》,第5期,65-88页。 Xu, Jing, et al. (2023) “Peer learning and cultural evolution.” Child Development Perspectives 17(2):97-105. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12482