Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Masaryk University
About Mengzhu
Mengzhu An is a post-doc researcher at Masaryk University. She received her PhD in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her doctoral research examined the moral experiences of urban Chinese parents raising autistic children within the postsocialist care regime. She also explores China’s growing early intervention market for developmental disabilities, shifting family and intimate dynamics in ASD households, and the emerging disability rights and neurodiversity movements. Her work engages with medical anthropology, the ethical and affective turns in anthropology, disability studies, STS, and feminism. As part of the EMOROB project, she is conducting ethnographic research in China, where AI-driven autism technologies are rapidly expanding. She is particularly interested in how social robots and affective programming reshape autism diagnosis and therapy; how ethical imaginaries of technology inform the development and commercialization of robotics; and how ideas of personhood and sociality are embedded in robotic design.