Siwei Lu

Siwei Lu holds a master’s degree in African Studies from Yale University. Siwei’s research interests include urban-rural relations, land governance, (de)coloniality and materiality in West Africa. Her master’s thesis examines Senegal’s social housing scheme 100,000 Logements through an ethnography on its first beneficiary community. Focusing on concrete and water, she shows how a welfare project that set out to reengineer both the material and social worlds produced unintended consequences and a lived experience of stagnation in the wake of so-called progress.

She currently studies digital land reform in West Africa and examines how digitization reshapes human-land relations and sociality. During her fellowship at the University of Ghana, she plans to conduct ethnographic research in the peripheral Great Accra. Before joining Yale, Siwei earned a Bachelor’s degree in French Studies from Peking University. In 2024, she worked as an intern in UN-Habitat in Nairobi, Kenya, where she supported capacity development services for national and local governments and contributed to the development of Habitat University Partnerships. Siwei is also an active public writer. She writes non-fiction and co-edites UrbanSense, a Chinese social platform dedicated to urban issues.