Hao-Tzu HO is an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (GIDS) at the National Chengchi university. She received her PhD in anthropology at Durham University and other degrees/certificates in sociology, international development, and information and communication media in Taiwan and England. She was a visiting researcher at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. Her doctoral research analyses how global local food activism is indigenised in post-1997 Hong Kong (a phenomenon she theorises as ‘cosmopolitan locavorism’). This ethnography depicts young farmers’ experimental forms of living in a city widely associated with neoliberalism and developmentalism. It examines their perceptions of localness/locality and practices to negotiate over land disputes and social norms.
Before joining the GIDS, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the National Taitung University, where she began fieldwork in indigenous settlements in the Eastern Part of Taiwan. Her current projects seek to explore individuality when participating in public affairs. The research focuses on discourses and actions related to human-nature relationships, cultural revitalisation, happiness, good life, and everyday practices related to these ideas. Her research interests include environmental anthropology, anthropology of the city, development studies, anthropology of emotion/affect/feeling, mental health, healing, and ethnographic research methods. Her long-run research plan is to compare the two seemingly dissimilar contexts, Hong Kong and indigenous communities in Taiwan, which nevertheless share much in common.