Chu (she/they) is an (un)thropologist and a first-gen Burmese diasporic writer-translator currently based in the traditional, ancestral, and historical land of Ho-Chunk and Menominee peoples, or now known as Wisconsin.
 
As an (auto)ethnographer, Chu enjoys reflexively pondering upon her own encounters in life in juxtaposition to a broader cultural and social infrastructure(s). As she pays attention to the actual things people say, they are also intrigued by many unspoken cues in people's gestures and manners. If the world is, as Burmese people would say, bawa zatkhone (theater-stage of life), all human beings would be storytellers in their own ways and Chu's job as an (un)thropologist is to ethically retell their (and her own) stories.

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 (un)thropologist, 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's doctoral dissertation titled "Intense Engagements: Social Media Activism in the Aftermath of the 2021 Military Coup in Myanmar" looks at the ways in which ordinary people's political engagement is fueled by circulation of certain public feelings on social media spaces in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar. She is interested in exploring how the intense circulation of images and speech interpellating their viewers and listeners to what is and is not acceptable in contemporary Burmese political life.
 
Chu's broader research interests encompass public feelings, social media, mediation, digital labor, visual culture, and gender. Their theoretical specializations include prior graduate trainings in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and doctoral trainings in feminist anthropology, urban ethnography, semiotics, discourse studies, diaspora studies, and feminist affect theories. Outside the walls of the academy, she dabbles into theories and conversations about decoloniality and abolitionism.
 
In addition to scholarly works, Chu is passionate about approaching her interests from experimental and collaborative perspectives. In 2020, they co-founded a virtual research collective called Aruna Global South as a space for emerging scholars and thinkers working in, on, and from Asian Global South who have been systematically marginalized in the spaces of knowledge production.
 
As a feminist decolonial scholar, Chu believes that the personal is truly the political. To invert the masculinist and ableist demands of producing knowledge in anthropology and in academia, they primarily use analytic autoethnography and patchwork ethnography in her works. When she is not challenging her own privileged background within the context of Myanmar as an ethno-religious majority Bama-Buddhist woman now situated in the US empire, she writes against whiteness and neocoloniality in higher education.

Her writings in Burmese under the pen name Ma Chinthe are underpinned by their intellectual interests in decolonization, abolitionism, and gender in Myanmar and its diaspora. Her debut essay collection titled Beyond the Wall of Words and Other Essays (စာတံတိုင်းကိုကျော်လွန်၍နှင့် အခြားဆောင်းပါးများ) was published by Independent Pin Yai / Yerba Press in 2023. Chu is currently working on a collection of translated essays by BIPOC scholars and theorists from English to Burmese.

Fun Fact about Chu: in her mother('s) language Burmese, their first name Chu has three meanings: coin money, floral arabesque (like the ones in the photo above), or stylized lion with a flowing mane. She picks the last meaning because lion with a flowing mane symbolizes, to her, strength, independence, and fierceness, all three qualities they aspire to emulate!