Joe Qiao

My name is Zhen, an M.A. student in Sociology at Columbia University. I’m from southern China, and I just graduated from UMass Amherst with a B.A. in sociology. My broader research interest aims to uncover the impact of macro-social changes on individuals. To break it down specifically, I want to explore when a new social institutional order enters an existing social environment and how individuals interact with it. Do people accept, resist, or use it to reshape the social order, and how do different resources and social positions lead to different outcomes?
I hope to use this research to observe the way people are changing themselves, to turn unpredictable and uncontrollable mechanisms into their own resources.