Pengyu Zhang

I am a PhD student in Middle East Politics and made my way here from a wide range of cross-disciplinary training in the Arabic language, Area Studies, Radical Political Economy, Human Geography, and Anthropology in my previous education. This scholarly development trajectory is primarily informed by two impetuses. On the one hand, both my learning of Arabic and my indulgent studying, living, and working experience in countries like Sudan and Iraq raised my dedicated interest in the region of the Middle East. On the other hand, my keen awareness of the general inequality in our societies and its spatial manifestations drove my curiosity to explore capital circulation, accumulation, and spatial productions under certain sets of social relations. These two impetuses, with inspirations drawn from my personal experience, led to my current PhD project on spatial politics of oil production in Southern Iraq.

For the same reason, I never fit into any specific academic field but draw theoretical and methodological tools widely to conduct my question-driven research. However, their differentiated research foci and paradigms developed such tension in my knowledge production that I will always seek a balance between my considerations of the local and the global, the partial and the total, the exceptional and the universal, and the contingent and the structural. These entanglements will long accompany my future research.