I am honored to be a recipient of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2021 year. This fellowship will support my book project “Changing Fate: The Cultural Revolution’s Rural Youth in Transition to Post-Mao China.” Here is an interview article about this award.

I am very happy to share the news that my dissertation on Chinese rural youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution won another international dissertation award, the 2019 Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award (Traditional Category). I attended the award ceremony at the 15th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, which was held at the University of Illinois in May 2019. As I said during the ceremony, it took a village to train a good qualitative methodologist. At the moment of celebrating achievements, I am particularly grateful to all my dissertation committee members for their years of support. I also take this award as a message of encouragement from the field of qualitative inquiry, which inspires me to continue the journey of turning this work into a monograph. Hopefully, it won’t take too long.

A detail about the ceremony: Indigenous scholars, culture, and rituals were very visible at the ceremony. Indigenous songs and music were played; the participants held hands to dance together following the music. Instead of celebrating individualistic achievements, I felt interconnected and encouraged. One of the indigenous scholars said at the ceremony, award in his language means “uplifting,” and that is the very reason for the gathering of that day. Yes, “uplifting,” this is the word that I was searching for. Decades later, I perhaps will forget the name of my award, but I will remember this very embodied feeling I experienced that day, UPLIFTING.

I am happy to announce that I’ve accepted the position of assistant professor of qualitative methodology in the College of Education at the University of Florida. It has been a long journey for me to get here but I am glad that I persisted—with the unfailing support from all the good people in my life. I am deeply grateful.

As summer is just around the corner, I am looking forward to moving to the sunshine state and starting my new life there.

Go Gators! 

It is a great honor for me to receive the top prize in the 2017 International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (IIQM) Dissertation Award — Ph.D. Level. The award came as a big surprise but I am excited to know my work has been recognized by the international qualitative research community. I look forward to presenting my study and receiving the award in next year’s Qualitative Health Research Conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Full news article

I am honored to be the graduate speaker at IU School of Education’s Winter Convocation. I used this opportunity to express how grateful I am to the faculty members and the fellow students in the school. I also shared with the audience my thoughts on our missions as educators and educational researchers in a global era. Below I would like to share with you, my dear readers, part of my speech:

Now we have graduated from our school. As we celebrate our achievements with our mentors, friends and family, my dear fellow graduates, please allow me to raise this question for us to ponder together: What are our missions as educators and educational researchers in this global era?

For me, as we acknowledge the privilege of receiving an education like ours, it is important to keep in mind those left out or left behind by globalization: They are the poor working class families who became jobless in America’s Rust Belt; they are the rural kids in China’s underdeveloped countryside whose parents had to left for work in the coastal cities; they are the teachers and students without basic supplies of paper and pencils in Uganda’s village schools.

Addressing these issues has never been easy. But as educators and educational researchers, we have our own strengths, approaches and commitment.

The first role model that occurs to me is our school’s alumnus Karen Ross. Currently an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Boston, Karen just published her book Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change. Perhaps the prospect of middle east peace process has never been dimmer than now, but Karen’s work has powerfully demonstrated that, the carefully implemented and grounded peace education programs will create long-term impact on its youth participants, and sow the seeds of social change.

The second example that I think of is Apple Suwannawut. Apple suffered from serious visual impairment. She completed her Phd in IST department through listening and reading Braille. In her own work, she strives to increase the accessibility of online learning platforms for learners of disabilities. When she returned to her homeland, Thailand, she became a youth leader and a renowned advocate for the rights of disabled people. She has been invited to numerous public events and her stories inspired many more people to pursue their dreams.

And of course, how can we forget our wonderful faculty members! Here please allow me to take this opportunity to express how grateful I am to my advisors, Dr. Phil Carspecken and Dr. Barbara Dennis. Thank you—for your unfailing support to not only my academic work but also beyond it, for your insightful intellectual guidance as well as the freedom you gave me to explore what I am interested in most, and above all, for showing me the value of being an exemplary teacher.

My dear fellow graduates, we are not alone here. No matter where you came from, no matter where you are going, we are connected, because of this school, because of our shared name, as educators and educational researchers. As you embark on new journeys, let’s all remember our life here—we used to sit together—equally, freely, peacefully, joyfully—and, we used to read inspiring works, work through challenges, and draw strength from one another.

This is our school’s commitment to us. Let it be our commitment to the world.

The panel I organized on doing fieldwork in contemporary China has been accepted by next year’s ICQI (International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry). Here are the abstracts of the panel and the paper that I am going to present in the panel.

Panel title: Doing Fieldwork in China Reconsidered: Reflexivity, State Power and Inbetweenness

This panel reflects upon how qualitative fieldwork as a form of knowledge production is mediated and shaped by the state power in contemporary China. It is often taken for granted that the late-socialist regime imposes strict censorship on researchers’ fieldwork, yet what is needed is a systematic discussion of the methodological and ethical challenges brought forward by the censorship and structural constraints. The papers in this panel investigate the effect of the state power on knowledge production and researchers’ responses from three aspects: the formulation of a research proposal (Duan), access to the field site (Ye), and researcher/research participant interactions (Zhao). Furthermore, existing literature foregrounds a narrative of western researchers entering field sites in China as outsiders of the society. All the authors in this panel are originally from the country and now work/study in western institutions. Together, we present a perspective of inbetweenness and challenge the western-centric narrative.

Paper title: Working the Hyphens in an Authoritarian State: Positionality, Intersubjectivity and Structural Constraints 

This paper explores the methodological and ethical challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork in an authoritarian state. Drawing from a long-term project conducted in North China, I discuss how a normalized idea of “political appropriateness” mediated the communication between me and my research participants of different genders and social statuses. This phenomenon adds a new layer to the old question of “can the subaltern speak” and calls for a refined understanding of the intricate power relationship between researchers and their research participants. Borrowing insights from Abrams’s state effect theory, I propose to treat the state as a core ideological construction, of which researchers and research participants work collaboratively to make sense. In this way, researchers can intentionally work against “political appropriateness” and still work with their research participants. This approach can, in turn, foster a more deliberate reflection of the process of knowledge production when doing fieldwork in an authoritarian state.

I am glad to announce that the panel I organized for the upcoming Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in 2018, “Displaced Youth: Migration, Education, and The Young Generations in China’s Post-Mao Era,” is accepted by the conference.

Here is the abstract of my paper, “Changing Fate: Rural Youth and the Resumption of the Merit-based Examinations in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.”

In 1977, Chinese government resumed the College Entrance Examination (gaokao), which by then had been abolished for 11 years. The College Entrance Examination, together with other merit-based examinations held by local governments in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, created new life chances for rural youth to cross the urban/rural divide and achieve upward social mobility in post-Mao China. This paper examines the life histories of those rural youths who succeeded in the merit-based examinations. It focuses on their experiences of taking the exams and receiving higher or professional education—according to their own words, the decisive events that “changed their fate.”

Based on ethnographic data, historical archives, and life history interviews with 41 then-rural-youths, the paper probes the meanings that underpin these former rural youths’ claims that the exams have changed their fate. I argue that “changing fate” for the rural youths involved a profound shift of value orientations and the experiences differed along the gender line. While the state’s grand narrative emphasizes the new educational opportunities provided by the exams, the former rural youths’ narratives focus more on the adjustment to an individualistic value and an emerging sense of uncertainty triggered by a mechanism of competition. Meanwhile, although both male and female narrators framed their life stories similarly, female narrators constantly encountered more structural obstacles in their pursuit of life opportunities and their fate-changing endeavors were very often compromised and incomplete.