Ruby YS LAI
黎苑姍

Ruby YS Lai is a sociologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a Fulbright Junior Scholar (2018/19) and a recipient of the Hong Kong Research Grant Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020/21) and the Hong Kong Research Grant Council Early Career Award (2022/23).

She specializes in gender, family, reproductive politics, housing, sexual violence, feminist movements, and qualitative methodology. Her research examines the intersection of multiple inequalities and the agency of disadvantaged groups and minorities. Her recent monograph, Premarital Abortion in China: Intimacy, Family, and Reproduction (Routledge, 2023), explores the impact of socioeconomic transformation on the reproductive experiences of young adult women in contemporary China. Her current project on subdivided units in Hong Kong investigates the gendered impacts of housing precarity and informality, focusing on the intersection of material and family culture and the reproduction of gender, class, and spatial injustice in urban contexts.

Her work has been published in The Sociological Review, China Quarterly, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Signs, Current Sociology, Contraception, Politics & Gender, and Modern China, among others.