University of Hong Kong

Faculty Member, Sociology

About

I received my PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2006. Before joining HKU, I worked in Taiwan as an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chang Jung Christian University, and as an instructor in the departments of Border Policing and Foreign Affairs at the Central Police University.

I am broadly interested in political culture, and specifically
interested in the ways that the pragmatic conduct of police work is linked to institutional aspects of the state, and to historical processes of social, political and economic change. I have conducted most of my research in Taiwan, looking at the historical formation of modern policing under Japanese colonial and Chinese authoritarian governments, as well as conducting a series of ethnographic studies exploring the adaptation of this policing system to the island's democratic transition. I am presently developing my research in a more
comparative direction, examining Taiwan in relation to various other East Asian policing regimes, notably those in the regions of Greater China.

Theoretically, my research is anchored to classical sociological concerns with the so-called "problem of social order," as refracted through a critical approach to subject formation based on rigorous attention to the performative or pragmatic dimensions of culture. I have taught widely, in both Chinese and English languages, across undergraduate, graduate and applied curricula. Through this hybrid of theory, practice, pedagogy and research, I am working to contribute to the emergence of a culturally informed approach to policing that brings contemporary academic methods of socio-cultural analysis into a truly productive and progressive conversation with the practitioner-centered discipline of police studies.

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