Completed Projects

Digital China 2013-2018

This project ran 2013-2018 and was funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Cultural Heritage 2012-2016.

In 2012 I received a major grant from the Swedish Research Council for a project on cultural heritage. The project resulted in several publications, including Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations Amsterdam University Press, 2018, co-edited with Christina Maags.

Investigative journalism 2008-2011

The project received funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation . The project among other things resulted in the volume Chinese Investigative Journalists’ Dreams: Agency, Autonomy, Voice (Lexington Books 2013) co-edited with Elin Sæther and Zhi’an Zhang.

Implementation of law 2004-2008

I was project leader of this research group that included six scholars from different universities and received funding from the Swedish Research Council and Sida. The project resulted in an edited volume, Making Law Work: Chinese Laws in Context (Cornell University Press 2011).

Human rights debates

In 1996, I defended my dissertation that traced the Chinese human rights debate during the period 1898-1949. I then continued to study developments in the post-1949 period resulting in the book, Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Together with Stephen C. Angle, Wesleyan University, I also published The Chinese Human Rights Reader: Documents and Commentary, 1900-2000 (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). Other works include Gender Equality, Citizenship and Human Rights: Controversies and Challenges in China and the Nordic Countries (Routledge 2010), that I co-edited with Pauline Stoltz, Sun Zhongxin, and Qi Wang, and “Human rights in China as an Interdisciplinary Field: History, Current Debates and New Approaches,” in Handbook of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Cushman (Routledge 2011).