Welcome!

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

My research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology, nationalism, collective behavior and social movements, diaspora and international migration, and sociology of culture, with a focus on global China, Taiwan, and transnational politics.  

Scroll down to see my research 

01. Dissertation Project

American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (ASA DDRIG) Recipient

My dissertation examines how a generation of US-based Chinese activists, mobilizing at the nexus of racial minority and diaspora politics, contest a movement field polarized by US-China geopolitical rivalry and cross-cutting ideological divides—one that collapses critique of the Chinese state into allegiance to the US, and vice versa, leaving little room for voices that challenge both. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and organizational publications, I show how these activists navigate this binary field logic and adapt tactically and organizationally to mobilize Chinese migrants whose political schemas are shaped by migration across authoritarian and democratic regimes. The project extends political sociology's polarization research from electoral arenas into civil society, bridges diaspora and immigrant studies of political participation, and offers an account of Chinese contentious space as it takes shape within and against transnational constraints.

02. The Formosan Black Bear and Taiwanese Nationalism

Publication: Chang, Yung-Ying, and John Chung-En Liu. 2026. “The Formosan Black Bear and Taiwanese Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.70092. [Link] [PDF]

My co-author and I examine nationalism in settler-colonial Taiwan amid China’s colonial claim to sovereignty. We show how the Formosan black bear became a national symbol of resistance to Chinese irredentism across three cumulative stages: early-2000s symbolic competition with China’s giant pandas; mid-2010s diffusion through branding, commodification, and political advocacy; and post-2017 politicization amid intensifying cross-strait tensions. Yet Han Taiwanese often attribute bear deaths to Indigenous communities and prioritize bear conservation, whose public popularity is partly associated with the bear’s national symbolism, over Indigenous communities’ everyday experiences of living with bears. We show that Taiwanese nationalism has anticolonial origins and continues as anti-hegemonic resistance, while suggesting that this bear symbolism may subordinate Indigenous perspectives in public discussions of human–bear conflicts. The paper offers a relational account of nationalism’s resistant and oppressive possibilities.

03. Negotiating Cultural and National Emotions: How Nationalist Contention Emerges in K-pop Cultural Consumption

How does nationalist contention emerge in cosmopolitan cultural consumption? Drawing on interviews with K-pop fans and observation of two online fan groups, I argue that the interplay between cultural emotions, arising when interacting with cultural objects, and national emotions, invoked through everyday practices of nationhood, can produce affective rupture that draws fans into nationalist contention, and that this process varies with a consumption space's social proximity to a cultural form's site of production. The paper advances a transnational mechanism linking popular culture consumption to political engagement.