Sociology

Dr. Shen received her PhD in Sociology in 2005 from Nanjing University, and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University. Dr. Shen has taught “Introduction to Social Work" and “Medical Social Work” at the undergraduate level and “Mental Health” to postgraduates. Her research is in the fields of social work and sociology, with a specific focus on social work and social services in China, drug addiction rehabilitation, and services for the elderly and disabled children. During her stay at HYI, she plans to conduct research on Christian universities and the emergence of social services in modern China.

Mr. Piseth KEO is a currently a doctoral scholar with the HYI-NUS Joint Scholarship Program. He is under the supervision of Assistant Professor Dr. Neo Choong Tiong, Harvey, Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, National University of Singapore. Mr. Keo has been working with natural resource management since late 2004. His research interests focus on understanding various concepts and approaches for natural resources management including political ecology, property right, social capital, command-control, common pool resources, and community based natural resource management.

Yasuhiro Kamimura is Associate Professor of Welfare Sociology and Comparative Social Policy at Nagoya University, Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo, and worked there and at Hosei University. He has published on the development of welfare states in East Asia, new corporatism in Korea and Taiwan, and social foundations of East Asian social policy.

Min-Hsiung Huang is associate professor/research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. His research interests include trends in racial test score gaps, the role of cognitive ability in determining one’s socioeconomic success, and the effects of educational institutions on student performance. His current research projects include the prevalence of after-school tutoring in relation to student performance distributions, the widening-gap phenomenon in student performance over time, and the influence of family background on student performance. All these projects are cross-national, and include data on more than a dozen countries.

Ho Kong Chong is Associate Professor of Sociology and Vice Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Trained as an urban sociologist at the University of Chicago, where he was a Harvard-Yenching Doctoral Scholar, Dr. Ho’s research interests are in the political economy of cities, urban communities, higher education, and youth. He is a board member of Research Committee 21 (Sociology of Urban and Regional, International Sociological Association) and an editorial board member of Pacific Affairs and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Kong Chong is co-author of City-States in the Global Economy: Industrial Restructuring in Hong Kong and Singapore (1997); Youth.sg: State of Youth in Singapore (2011) and co-editor of Service Industries, Cities and Development Trajectories in the Asia-Pacific (2005); Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia (2008), and New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities (2012).

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.