Profile

I am currently a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Oregon. My research covers the areas of labor, organization, migration, gender, social reproduction and globalization. I have been working on various types of migration – internal and international, unskilled and highly skilled – in China and in the US, and integrating these studies into analysis of state changes, labor relations, cultural reproduction of inequality, and political economy issues.  My last project examines the internal immigration within China: rural migrants for the first time labor as co-workers with urban service proletariat in service sitting in urban center rather than in foreign-invested factories. Drawing on data from three-months ethnographic research in a retail work setting, I find that urban workers and rural migrants forge socio-cultural boundaries to replace spatial boundaries that once defined class difference. Hoping to make myself less parochial, I choose a different type of migration for my dissertation – the international migration of Chinese Engineers into the US multinational high-tech corporations.