Jing Xu

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.