I study global mobility, transnational education, and the political economy of urban and community development. My research examines how mobility becomes both a strategy for pursuing desired futures and a condition that reshapes everyday life, belonging, and political possibility.
Grounded in people’s efforts to secure livable futures, my work traces how movement becomes a form of world-making and self-repositioning under geopolitical strain, while also revealing the limits of cosmopolitan flexibility in an increasingly hardened global order.
My forthcoming book, Destination Diploma: How Chinese Upper-Middle Class Families ‘Outsource’ Secondary Education to the United States (under contract with Columbia University Press), analyzes the phenomenon of Chinese families sending their children to U.S. private high schools, showing how fragile cosmopolitan aspirations reveal the limits of elite flexibility in a changing world. I also collaborate internationally on edited volumes and special issues on elite education, youth migration, childhood in East Asia, and global citizenship.
My current project examines the quasi-exile condition of an emerging group of migrants, primarily cultural workers from increasingly authoritarian contexts, who carve out new spaces for “homeland” narratives beyond the nation-state.
I am a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and received my Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.