About

Nicholas Bartlett is an anthropologist of China with training in medical anthropology and psychoanalysis. He holds a BA from Pomona College, an MIA from Columbia University, and a PhD in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as UCSF. His first book, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China, offers a phenomenological account of long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction in a tin mining city. His research explores the introduction of group relations conferences to China, examining how these events, designed to provoke phantasy and conflict, facilitate the connection, critique, and reflection of geopolitical tensions, intimate dreams, and authority. His fieldwork involves participating in staff and member roles at conferences and visiting workplaces to understand how the negotiation of meanings in and around group relations conferences contributes to imagining authority and collective life in contemporary China and beyond. Prior to his position at Barnard College, he taught anthropology courses at USC and UCLA and worked as a research analyst candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Political Science
• Economics
• Law
• Psychiatry
• Development economics
• Geography
• Virology
• History
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Group Relations in China

  2026-04-13

  book-chapter

  This chapter provides a longitudinal perspective of group relations in China from 2014 to 2021 through portraits, or selfies, of our experience in group relations. We use a theory of trust to organise our experiences in various roles and reveal eight stages of group relations development, which will be discussed in the implications section of this chapter. Our theory of trust is drawn from Lewicki and Bunker (1995) who posit three stages of trust. Our eight stages of organisational development were influenced by Burke (2018).

  PublisherDOI

• Toward an Understanding of “Release” ( <i>Fangkai</i> ): Labor, Minerals, and the Transformation of a Mountain Region in China's Long 1980s

  positions asia critique · 2025-07-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In 1985, Hu Yaobang gave a speech in Gejiu urging local officials to follow national efforts to “release” nearby minerals. Tens of thousands of workers who had previously been excluded from the industry subsequently flocked to the nearby mountains to aid in extraction efforts. Tin outputs surged over the next decade. This essay explores the opening of the mining sector in this period by attending to how competition among different groups gave new meanings to the government's categories of Big and Small. Common since the early 1980s, these designations could refer to the quality of ore in the earth's crust, the scale of extraction efforts, as well as the types of organizations authorized to mine. Reforming this sector in the mountains of southern Yunnan required local actors to pioneer new ways of both recruiting and repelling workers of various backgrounds, foster mountainside relationships between long-standing SOE miners and newcomers, and innovate extraction practices that further transformed state, collective, and privately run organizations. Crucial debates about scale, government oversight, hierarchies of labor, ownership, the fate of Maoist infrastructures, and, most fundamentally, if and how the “masses” (qunzhong) could be integrated into the opening economy came to be adjudicated on and in the mountains around Gejiu.

  PublisherDOI

• Editor's Introduction: <i>Neng</i> 能 and China's Long 1980s: A Reevaluation

  positions asia critique · 2025-07-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The impetus for this special issue emerged from a conversation between the coeditors about the "long 1980s," a time spanning from the end of the Mao era in 1976 to Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992.Chinese society in these years experienced profound changes as national policies moved from promoting class struggle to pursuing economic development.Both of us found that our research continually returned to this period.In fieldwork exploring recovery from addiction in a mountainous region in southern Yunnan, Nick discovered that middle-aged members of a generational cohort of heroin users frequently spoke of the lasting impact of Deng-era state mining policies, transformations in work units, and family tensions associated with their entry into the workforce.In her research on documentary media, Ying explored how cinema and the new media of the day, television, participated in the rehabilitation campaigns in the late 1970s and early 1980s and

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Two Movements in the 1980s: Forces That Shaped Contemporary China

  positions asia critique · 2025-07-25

  article

  Abstract In this interview, Li Tuo reflects on the complexity of the intellectual landscape of the 1980s. He observes that “Thought Liberation” (Jiefang sixiang) was not a uniform movement but rather consisted of numerous clusters of intellectuals making efforts in different directions, including the “New Enlightenment” group clustered around the serial publications China and the World and Toward the Future, and the grassroots economists assembled at the Mount Mogan Conference and Courtyard Number Nine. Through the careful tracing of these groups’ sweeping activities that ranged from policymaking to empirical research, philosophy, literature, and translation, Li Tuo demonstrates the importance of the collaboration between state and grassroots actors and between generations of intellectuals and party cadres as forces that continue to shape China.

  PublisherDOI

• Part IV: Calculations

  2022-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Part III: Photos from the New Year

  2022-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Springer eBooks · 2022 · 6 citations

  • History
  • Geography
  • Virology
  PublisherDOI

• Part II: The Second Wave

  2022-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• On Knowing Addiction

  PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2021-06-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tributes to Jingyuan Zhang and <i>Psychoanalysis in China</i>

  Psychoanalysis and History · 2021-08-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rafadi Hakim

  University of Chicago

  14 shared

• Margaux Fitoussi

  Columbia University

  10 shared

• Robert Desjarlais

  8 shared

• Alexa Hagerty

  University of Cambridge

  8 shared

• Parthiban Muniandy

  Sarah Lawrence College

  8 shared

• Sabina Perrino

  8 shared

• Aurora Donzelli

  University of Bologna

  8 shared

• Emily Ng

  Chinese University of Hong Kong

  8 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Pomona College

• M.A.

  Columbia University

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Berkeley