Chen Liang

I am a doctoral candidate from the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

My research interests are in the areas of race and ethnicity, political participation, immigration, and transnationalism, focusing especially on these issues in relation to contemporary Asian American politics. 

You can find my CV here.

My book project, Paradoxical Politics: Organizing Asian Americans’ Political Participation in a Southern Metropolis, details how the entrenched racial politics in the contemporary United States shape Asian American partisan political organizers’ experiences and their approach to organizing Asian American voters, many of whom are newly arrived immigrants. Particularly, it offers insights into how Asian American political organizers in a minority context organize Asian American voters and struggle to increase Asian Americans’ political power. The findings are based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork from March 2021 to November 2022 and 95 in-depth interviews with Asian American partisan and non-partisan political organizers in Houston, Texas.

By critically analyzing the experiences of Asian American political organizers, I use Asian Americans as a case to spell out the way immigrant minorities reproduce and reshape existing racial hierarchy when pursuing political power, as well as the marginalization and ostracism that they face when participating in politics. The findings advance our understanding of the impact Asian Americans have on US politics and race relations today.

I have published two articles from my dissertation project:

1) “Asian Americans’ Racialized Incorporation into the Political Field”, is published in the journal Social Problems. In this article, I examine how the racialization of Asian Americans manifests in politics, and how such processes shape Asian Americans’ racialized experiences and identity. 
 
2) “Gendered Panethnic Solidarity: The Experiences of Asian American Women in US Electoral Politics” is forthcoming in the journal Qualitative Sociology. It investigates the doubly disadvantage position Asian American women occupy in politics, bringing the gender perspective into the literature on panethnicity. 

Meanwhile, I have three articles that are now under review or in preparation.

1) The Asian American Unelectability Paradox: How Racialization Shapes Asian American Political Candidates’ and Organizers’ Experiences in a Minority Context (under review in the journal Sociological Perspective).

2) Taiwanese American for Trumps?: Conservative Taiwanese Americans’ racialized assimilation into the US White mainstream society (in preparation for submission). 

3) Asian Americans and the Tri-Racial Hierarchy in US Politics (in preparation for submission).

Manuscripts are available upon request.

I also have a collaboration project on college students’ attitudes toward guns. One of the articles from this project, titled “How Attitudes about Guns Develop over Time”, is published in the journal Sociological Perspective. Another one is forthcoming in The Handbook of Society and Firearms.

CV
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