Speakers
Keynotes
Professor Dominique Desjeux
Dr. Desjeux is the director of the Master's program in Anthropology at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He has recently created a professional doctorate program in the human sciences--perhaps the first of its kind in France--designed for professional business, government, and NGO researchers.
A widely-read scholar and journal editor, Desjeux has focused on the material conditions of daily life. His "itinerary method" is used around the world as an analytical and methodological tool to understand consumers and the goods that they purchase, transport, store and use.
Of special importance to our conference, Dominique has worked for more than 10 years in the South of China as a researcher and as an educator. His graduate students, drawn from the South China region, are now among the preeminent young anthropological scholars of daily life in the New China. Dominique's research recently has included food products, pharma, and cosmetics and on decision processes in complex organizations. He is also the principal in a commercial research firm, Argonautes.
Dominique is most recently the author of La consummation (Consumption: PUF, collection Que-sais-je 2006). With Zheng Lihua and Anne Sophie he is the author of How the Europeans Look to the Chinese (Comment les chinois voient les européns: Paris, PUF 2003) and over 50 other co-authored and single-author articles and books. He is a visiting professor at U. South Florida and at the Institute for Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
Lyn Jefferey
Dr. Jefferey is a cultural anthropologist and Research Director at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit think-tank and resource for strategic business and government insights.
Lyn has spent the last 20 years living and working between California and mainland China. In China she has worked at a number of jobs including professional editing and translation, television production, NGO organizing, and conducting research as a Fulbright scholar.
Lyn is the co-editor of China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture (Duke 2001), as well as author of articles on post-socialist entrepreneurialism and Chinese network marketing.
She brings expertise in ethnographic methods and analysis to our conference as well as a widely-recognized expertise in group facilitation and speaking. Lynn has worked in all of the research programs at Institute for the Future. She has led numerous research tasks for individual clients and is a practiced content facilitator. Lyn is fluent in Mandarin.
Ken C. Erickson
Ken is a cultural anthropologist and the CEO of Pacific Ethnography. He has studied Chinese daily life since 1999, when he began working in and around the Chinese then-just-digitizing (and televising) Chinese music industry. In China, Erickson has worked on personal care products, oral care, personal electronic design research, studies of rural youth and urban workers.
Recently, Ken helped design a study of the in-flight (and pre- and post-flight) experiences of handicapped airline passengers in China, India, Latin America and the USA for The Boeing Company. Erickson and his colleague Jo Yung are presenting the results of that work at the World Aviation Interiors Expo in Hong Kong in September.
A frequent trainer and speaker, Erickson is a visiting professor at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago de Chile, where he is responsible for teaching the ethnographic research portion of that University's Master's Program in Consumer Behavior. Erickson speaks fluent Spanish and some Swedish, Vietnamese, and Mandarin.