About
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology with a certificate in Science, Technology & Society Program. My research interests intersect gender, work/labor, science and technology studies, and political economy. I am the 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. I am currently a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Sociology for the 2024-2025 academic year.
My dissertation examines feminized livestreaming labor, the largest form of platform-based employment for women in China, contextualizing it within the broader history of women’s labor in the post-socialist era. This study analyzes how digitalization reshapes human-machine relations in the workplace and explores its socio-economic and political implications for gender and family dynamics. By comparing the current cybernetic labor regime with the previous Taylorist model, I investigate the evolving relationship between gender subjectivities and political economy through the lens of technology. As a historically-minded ethnographer, I am experimenting with ways to think and write historically about ethnography. My previous project explored the hidden costs of flexibility in the informal economy, focusing on how informal and irregular workers in the U.S. navigate blurred work-family boundaries.
My research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG), the International Institute, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and the Rackham Graduate School. My work has received multiple paper awards, including from the Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), the Economic Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, and the Ethnological and Historical Sciences at the University of Chicago. One of my ethnographic photos was honored with the Ethno-Photography Award at the Annual Chicago Ethnography Conference.
I have extensive experience in gender and sexuality education and activism. Before graduate school, I taught migrant and refugee children in Beijing and London. In London, I collaborated with local NGOs to create programs for refugee children impacted by gender-based violence. In Beijing, I contributed to developing the first sexuality education textbooks promoting gender and sexuality rights and programs supporting local feminist and LGBTQ+ NGOs.
