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.

My book project, Organizing Asian Americans’ Political Participation in a Southern Metropolis, is situated at the intersection of race, immigration, and political participation, detailing 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 challenges that racial minorities with a recent immigration history face when they strive to incorporate themselves and their communities into the fabric of the US political landscape. The findings also advance our understanding of the impacts Asian Americans bring to US politics today.

My paper, “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. 

I have three articles that are now under review. They address 1) the “unelectability” of Asian American political candidates, 2) the experiences of Asian American women in politics, and 3) conservative Taiwanese Americans’ political attitudes. 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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