Chris Vasantkumar, Luce Junior Professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology, delivered a paper titled "Merely (About) Minzu?: Marginal Han, Whiteness Studies and the Symptoms of Social Difference in Contemporary Northwest China" at the first Critical Han Studies Conference at Stanford University April 25-27. Vasantkumar argued that projects studying majority Han identity in China have much to learn from the successes and failures of the study of whiteness in the United States. Specifically, Critical Han Studies should avoid an over-reliance on abstract or absolute categories and attend instead to locally specific idioms of ethno-racial practice as well as to the other sorts of difference that shape the contours of majority identity.