Jun Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, with a certificate in the Science, Technology & Society Program. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, labor, political economy, and science and technology studies. She is a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Sociology for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Jun’s dissertation is a multi-year, multi-sited ethnography of China’s live-commerce sector—the country’s largest platform-based employer of women. Situated within the longer arc of post-socialist transformations in women’s labor, the study examines how digital technologies reconfigure the labor process and generate new regimes of subjectivity, with far-reaching implications for transformations of the self, class politics, and social reproduction under China’s digital capitalism. Her previous project examined the individualized costs of complying with regulatory mandates for clear work-family separation amidst the lived realities of increasingly blurred boundaries in precarious work. Jun’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Research on Women & Gender, the International Institute, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and the Rackham Graduate School.
Papers from these projects have received awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association—including Sex and Gender, Economic Sociology, and Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology—as well as from Sociologists for Women in Society, Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, and the Division of Ethnological and Historical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her ethnographic photographs have been recognized by the Chicago Ethnography Conference and the University of Michigan’s International Institute.
Before pursuing her doctorate, Jun worked extensively in gender and sexuality education and activism. In Beijing, she taught migrant children and helped develop the country’s first comprehensive sexuality education textbooks, while supporting feminist and LGBTQ+ initiatives. Later, while studying Gender and Development in London, she led street outreach with two U.K. non-profits and designed educational programs for refugee children affected by gender-based violence.
