Jun Zhou is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Society, and an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow. She is a scholar of labor, gender, and political economy, using historical ethnography and social theory to examine how technological transformations reorganize gendered labor and reshape the futures women can plan.
Jun's dissertation and planned book, Dancing with Metrics: The Digitalization of Women's Labor in China, draws on multi-year ethnographic research in China's live-commerce industry, the country's largest platform labor market for women. Setting this new work against earlier generations of women's labor in factory and service work, she argues that digital platforms remake the terms of both work and life, redistributing economic opportunity while making marriage and childbearing harder to plan.
Her work appears in Work and Occupations and Big Data & Society, and her articles have won nine prizes and honorable mentions from four sections of the American Sociological Association (Sex and Gender; Economic Sociology; Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology; and Science, Knowledge, and Technology), Sociologists for Women in Society, the LaborTech Research Network, University of Michigan, and University of Chicago. Her research has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, among others.
