Yu Zhang张玉

For three months I worked as an assistant brewer in a small natural brewery in Yunnan, studying how brewers and microorganisms negotiate a shared space. The expertise I wanted to document lived in smell, touch and timing rather than in anything my participants could state directly, so I joined the work rather than observing it from outside, building field access across linguistic and ethnic boundaries through sustained embedding and reflexive positionality work.

I traced how cleaning practices, temperature decisions and moments of deliberate non-intervention constituted a relationship neither party fully controlled. From this I developed competitive collaboration: an analytic framework for working relationships sustained not through consensus but through continuous, friction-filled adjustment between actors of unequal power sharing a space under conditions of uncertainty.

Three months of qualitative fieldwork with internal labour migrants working as street food vendors during the COVID-19 lockdown, tracing how livelihood and spatial precarity intersect under informal urban governance. Participants were men and women across age groups who had migrated from less-developed regions to sustain themselves in the urban informal economy.

I built access by becoming a regular customer and gradually entering vendors’ everyday networks. Early on a community gatekeeper feared the research would trigger governmental repression of their trade; I worked through this by being transparent about the study’s policy orientation. Mapping where vendors lived revealed that they clustered in the same area, an early version of the participatory mapping I now propose to use in Amsterdam.

This is private video material for my application to the PhD position ‘Navigating Labour and Housing Precarity in Amsterdam’ at the University of Amsterdam. Please do not share this video for any purpose other than the PhD selection process.