Welcome! I am a Sociology Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. I study people's political ideas and practices in different contexts. My research interest lies at the intersection of race and ethnicity, migration studies, Asian American studies, political sociology, collective behaviors and social movements, and global and transnational sociology.

My current research includes three projects:

1. Dissertation project (Committee Chair: Hana Shepherd, Rutgers Sociology)  
   I explore Chinese immigrants in the U.S. who mobilize themselves both as members of the diaspora advocating for democratization in China and as immigrants using progressive approaches to combat sociopolitical inequality in the U.S. I ask: Why and how do these two forms of political engagement inform each other? Why and how does a tension arise from them and manifest for these activists?  What do this tension and the activists’ navigation of it reveal about the intersection of racialization, gender and sexual oppression, geopolitical transmissions, transnational repression, and American mainstream political polarity?
2. Formosan Black Bear, Nationalism, and Human-Animal Relationship (Co-author with John Chung-En Liu, Sociology at National Taiwan University, work-in-progress)
   How does nationalism take shape in places with robust democratic institutions, which encourage liberal expression of nationhood, and challenging geopolitical threats, which lead to restrictive nationalism, like Taiwan? My co-author and I study Formosan black bear nationalism in Taiwan and examine how people navigate and contest these opposing forces of nation-building. We uncover an animal-human imagination organized along three dimensions: us, other, and marginalized us. Taiwanese imagine themselves as endangered Formosan Black Bear (“us”), contrasting with privileged pandas from China (“other”). However, this imagination further marginalizes other endangered wildlife and indigenous people involved and stigmatized in human-bear conflicts (“marginalized us”). The establishment of and reflection on this animal-human imagination centers the importance to study different types of nationalism as “forces” interplaying with each other as opposed to static typology with which societies and nations are categorized.
3. Political Talk in Cultural Space: Everyday Political Talk among Transnational K-pop Fans (under review)
   How do cultural consumers who share common cultural tastes but hold divergent political beliefs engage in everyday political discussion? This study examines transnational K-pop fans' participation in informal political talk, focusing on their negotiation of political topics emerging within the K-pop sphere and broader geopolitical contexts. By analyzing how fans contest issues such as celebrities' political stances and international conflicts, I explore the intersection of fandom and political identity. Transnational fans articulate and challenge their own and others' political beliefs while negotiating the complex relationship between politics and popular culture. This process is driven by their affective investment in the field, as they navigate the tension between their parasocial relationships with celebrities and their potentially conflicting political ideologies, as well as those of fellow fans.

Here is my CV, and you can also find me on X.

📧Please feel free to get in touch at [email protected] 

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Taitung, Taiwan

Last Update: Jul. 2024