Welcome to our new ToRS Post-doctoral Researcher
Sandal received her PhD in China Studies from Aarhus University, where she finished a monograph-based dissertation with the title Daigou: Transnational Flows, Relatedness, and the Reproduction of the Chinese Family. She obtained a master’s degree in Culture, Communication, and Globalization from Aalborg University. She also had short-term study experience at Doshisha University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Sandal’s PhD dissertation discusses the impact and meaning of transnational daigou (buying-on-behalf-of) businesses, where Chinese immigrants, primarily women, supply networks of kin and friends in China with infant formula bought in Denmark. The circulation of goods and capital between consumers and suppliers results in an extensive transnational network based on mutual trust and morality. In this respect, the daigou practices constitute both vertical intergenerational and horizontal transnational forms of relatedness, which in different ways contribute to solving the conundrum of family reproduction in contemporary China and the Chinese diaspora. This research project has been reported by Danish media. Follow the discussion here.
Sandal’s current research is part of a collaborative ethnographic project Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China, funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF).