Teaching Fellows

Hanna Pickwell is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in consumption, aesthetics, value(s), ethics, and affect, especially as they take shape in urban China.

Her dissertation explores how variously positioned social actors in Beijing relate to old, used, and outmoded everyday objects, and the efficacies of things in their social worlds. The ethnography engages with secondhand goods vendors, aging neighbors who assembled a public collection of their own outmoded things, and youth who reappropriated discarded junk from the street during the pandemic. This research attends to value transformations at various scales, including relationships with the past and assessments of what is worth keeping, aesthetic judgments of what can count as beautiful, critical creative practices in everyday life, and ethical orientations to the self, others, and the environment in China today. 

Pickwell’s research has received support from Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the China-US Scholars Program. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2024.