I am a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, leading the development of the Mobility Lab (MoLab) and working on the global mobility of young people, transnational elite education, as well as the political economy of urban and community development. I previously worked at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research at NYU Shanghai and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
I hold a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
My forthcoming book, Destination Diploma: How Chinese Upper-Middle Class Families ‘Outsource’ Secondary Education to the United States (under contract with Columbia University Press), illustrates the construction of a transnational elite narrative and the inherent uncertainties of transnationalism through the lens of urban upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their children.
This project draws on data from multiple qualitative methods, including content analysis of educational consulting advertisements and online materials, ethnographic participant observation of school recruitment workshops, and in-depth interviews with over a hundred Chinese parents, students, and educational consultants. This book tells a story of a transnational intergenerational class-making project through “outsourcing” elite education, and documents the identity formation, trajectories, and aspirations of teenage student migrants—the “parachute generation”–amid the global uncertainties of geopolitical tensions, the rise of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It engages with a triple analytical framework of transnational elite education, the rising global middle class, and the ongoing negotiation of citizenship, membership, and identities across borders, concluding with a discussion of what I termed “fragile cosmopolitanism” as the imaginaries of global citizenship wane.
I also collaborate with globally diverse scholars to edit books and special issues that bring new perspectives on transnational elite education, youth migration, childhood studies in East Asia, and evolving understandings of global citizenship. My new project focuses on the quasi-exile mentality of an emerging group of migrants—primarily cultural workers from increasingly authoritarian countries—who carve out new spaces for “homeland” narratives beyond the nation-state.