Chu May Paing (she/they) is a cultural anthropologist and a first-gen Burmese diasporic writer. Born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar and currently a migrant in the US, Chu is infatuated with the stories of diasporic kinship, belonging, and refusal towards their newly adapted ways of life. As a writer and an anthropologist, both her scholarly and non-scholarly works engage with the concepts of temporal positionalities, intense feelings, and shifting materialities in attempting to understand what it means to be a human. Chu defended her doctoral dissertation titled 鈥淚ntense Engagements: Social Media Activism in the Aftermath of the 2021 Military Coup in Myanmar鈥� in May 2024 and graduated with a PhD from the Department of Anthropology. Their dissertation look at how ordinary people鈥檚 political engagement is fueled by circulation of certain public feelings on social media spaces in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar.
Received PhD in 2024