Grad Student Lunch Seminar: Rethinking Racial Capitalism, with Hanna Lin

Hanna Lin, a fifth-year graduate student in Government, will theorize Chinese hukou (household registration) system as a central mechanism through which the Chinese state produces racialized differentiation within the ostensibly homogeneous Han majority. By binding social welfare and benefits to place of registration, hukou transforms rural Han migrant workers into a population simultaneously desired as labor and excluded as full humans.

The Graduate Student Lunch Seminar is a recurring forum for graduate students connected to the Center to share their research and receive substantive, multidisciplinary feedback in a supportive setting. Each seminar features one fellow presenting their current work, creating space for the kind of engaged, cross-disciplinary conversation that enriches scholarship and strengthens intellectual community within the Center.

All are welcome, and undergraduate fellows are especially invited to attend, making the seminar a bridge across stages of academic development. For undergraduates weighing whether to pursue graduate study, these sessions offer something rare: an honest, up-close view of how research actually unfolds, alongside the chance to learn from near-peers navigating that path.

Lunch seminars take place from 12–1:30pm at the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures at 235 Garden Street (3rd Floor, CCC Building). Lunch will be provided free of charge. Please register in advance to let us know you’re coming and tell us if you have any food allergies we should be aware of.