Sociology

TING Jen-Chieh is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Ting graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sociology Department in 1997, specializing in Social Psychology and Sociology of Religion. His dissertation is a case study of the Buddhist Tzu-Chi Association, one of the most fluorishing Buddhist movements in Taiwan. Later, his interests moved to the study  of new religious phenomena in modern Taiwan, especially concerning the dynamics of syncretism, spiritualism, charity, and local leadership under Chinese cultural context. Studies cover various modern religious organizations and movements, such as the Tzu-Chi Association,  Ching Hai Association, True Buddha Association, this-world Buddhism, and some folk collective trance movements, etc. At HYI his project was on both the Falun Gong overseas and the organization of Scientology.

LI Kang began his sociological training in 1989 at Fudan University and received his MA and Ph.D. in 1996 and 1999 from Peking University. He has lectured on Classical & Contemporary Sociological Theory and Historical Sociology in Peking University and Tsinghua University. In  his research he focuses on the revolutionary mobilization mechanism in rural China’s Land Reform around the 1940s, and tries to find a way to combine the approaches of traditional social history and new social-cultural history, the materials of oral narratives and official documents, and attempts to use some key categories such as memory, body and identity in contemporary social theory to explicate the long-term political, cultural and social effects of the Chinese revolution on common villagers and their elite mobilization pattern.

Ryoko Kosugi is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Sociology, Tohoku University, Japan. Her dissertation focuses on a comparative analysis of student movements in Japan and in the United States in the 1960s. The Japanese and American student movements in the 1960s had in common a direct action-oriented strategy, the idea of participatory democracy, criticism toward the role of the university in capitalistic society, and the process of each campus conflict. However, while it is widely recognized that the youth revolts of the 1960s are strongly related to the present form of civil society in the U.S., the relationship between Japan’s student movement and the current Japanese civil society remains unclear. In planning her dissertation, her goal is to better understand the legacy of the student movement in the 1960s for the present Japanese civil society by comparing it to the American case and pointing out the differential factors between the student movements in two countries.

Liu Yiran is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sociology Department at Tsinghua University. A Beijing native, she received her B.A. in both English Literature and International Journalism and Communication from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She pursued graduate study at the University of Oxford and received her M.Sc. degree in Sociology. Her main research interests focus on the urbanization process in China and the problems brought by it. Her current research centers on the unique characteristics of Chinese social movements and how the movements are influenced by people’s cognition and the Chinese culture behind it.