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Ding Fei

  • Assistant Professor
Curriculum Vitae (CV)

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Affiliations

Academic Research Areas

  • Cities
  • Economic development
  • Infrastructure
  • Infrastructure planning
  • International studies in planning
  • Social policy
  • Urbanism
  • Labor
  • Migration
  • International Development
  • Economic Geography
Ding Fei is an interdisciplinary scholar working across international development, infrastructure planning, migration and labor studies, and economic geography. Her research asks how transnational actors — states, firms, and individuals — shape and experience development in an increasingly multipolar world. Focusing on Africa-China/China-Africa relations, she examines development as a lived and contested process, looking beyond interstate diplomacy and national policy to the very sites of production, governance, and everyday life. Across multiple projects, Fei traces how ideas and institutions drawn from China’s development experience travel and are reworked in different African contexts, and how they reshape industrial policy, infrastructure governance, labor regimes, and urban transformation.
Person with shoulder-length dark hair wearingblack-rimmed glasses

Academic Research Areas

  • Cities
  • Economic development
  • Infrastructure
  • Infrastructure planning
  • International studies in planning
  • Social policy
  • Urbanism
  • Labor
  • Migration
  • International Development
  • Economic Geography

I interrogate the presumed homogeneity of “Chinese capitalism” by analyzing how Chinese state-owned enterprises, state-affiliated agencies, private investors, and migrants engage with host country institutions and actors to produce new urban forms and living conditions.

Publications

  • Grounding China’s Global Engagements: Narratives, Spatial Forms, and Coalitional State Capitalism

    Fei, Ding. 2026. Eurasian Geography and Economics, volume 67, issue 4–5, pages 632–646.

  • The Missing Urban Dimension in China’s Global Initiatives

    Fei, Ding. 2026. Nature Cities, volume 3, pages 1–4.

  • AESTHETIC POLITICS AND ELITE‐DRIVEN URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICAN CITIES: The Case of Beautifying Sheger in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Fei, Ding, Jinpeng Yang, and Yucheng Zhang. 2026. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

  • Speculative Urban Infrastructure in the Context of Chinese Engagement in Africa

    Fei, Ding. 2026. Urban Studies, volume 63, issue 1, pages 76–97.

  • Flexible Sovereignty and Contested Legality: The Overseas Employment and Legal Struggles of Chinese Workers

    Fei, Ding. 2025. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 43, issue 3, pages 442-463.

Classes

Selected Awards, Grants, and Fellowships

  • Mui Ho Center for Cities Faculty Seed Grant

    2026

  • CCSS Faculty Fellows

    2025

  • Affinito-Stewart Grant

    2024

  • The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology–Cornell University Joint Seed Grant

    2022

  • Early Career Fellowship in China Studies, Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies

    2020

Selected Exhibitions and Presentations

  • Aesthetic Politics and Chinese-Backed Urban Development in Africa: Beautifying Sheger in Addis Ababa

    Africa-China Initiative Spring Symposium, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (2026).

  • Chinese Migration in Africa: Motivations, Mobility Regimes, and Post Covid-19 Transformations. Africa Forum

    Center for Global Black Studies, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL (2026).

  • The Urban Dimension of Africa-China Cooperation

    Annual Meeting of African Studies Association, Atlanta, GA (2025).

  • Chinese Infrastructure Speculation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Planning in Africa II, Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. Seattle, WA (2024).

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