yung-ying chang
Methodologically, I apply a transnational, comparative lens grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival analysis.
My work engages with political sociology, migration, social movement, and cultural sociology.
My research program can be organized into three domains:
- Diaspora Activism in a Geopolitically Polarized Advocacy Field (Dissertation project; Committee Chair: Hana Shepherd, Rutgers Sociology)
Authoritarian regimes like China’s routinely suppress collective organizing and open criticism. Why, then, have expanded political opportunities in liberal democracies often failed to create an enabling environment for homeland critique by Chinese migrants?
I study a cohort of US-based Chinese grassroots groups who advance an anti-authoritarian critique of the PRC alongside US progressive commitments to illustrate the polarized meso-level advocacy field itself as a structural barrier that constrains migrants’ criticism of authoritarian home states. - Nationalism, Settler
Colonialism, and Non-human Symbol
2.1 Black bear nationalism (Co-authored with John Chung-En Liu, Sociology at National Taiwan University, under review)
This paper examines how Taiwanese nationalism is both a project of anti-hegemonic resistance and an extension of settler colonial structures. Tracing the rise of the endemic and endangered Formosan black bear as a Taiwanese national symbol of “us” vis-à-vis China’s giant panda (“other”) amid resistance to China’s irredentist ambitions toward Taiwan, we show how this animal symbolism further marginalizes Indigenous peoples, already subject to ongoing Han settler colonialism, by disproportionately blaming them for bear deaths stemming from the overlap between their ancestral territories and core bear habitats.
2-2. (manuscript in prep) The paper examines how states deploy cuteness-inflected forms of political communication, often featuring animal characters, to navigate geopolitical uncertainty.
2-3. (manuscript in prep) The paper examines the roles of forests in nationalism narratives in post-WWII Taiwan.
- Contested Political talk in K-pop Fandom (under review)
This paper compares how political talk unfolds in two groups of K-pop fans with varying social and geographic embeddedness in the Asian region, which influences the substance of the political issues raised and norms regarding how the issues ought to be discussed. It concpetualizes contentious political talk at the group level as underpinning what appears as unified action at the field level during episodes of collective mobilization.