Julia Chuang, Sociology, Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, Boston College, is the author of, The Changing Foundations of Chinese Development. She will speak as part of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative on Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market.

Julia Chuang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology. She received a Ph.D. in 2014 from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2014 to 2016 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Chuang’s research uses ethnography to show how the movement of people shapes global economic processes. Her book manuscript, The Changing Foundations of Chinese Development, applies this method to the Chinese economy. It follows labor brokers and migrant workers as they move between the villages where they live and the cities where they work. Her book shows how their migrations reflect ongoing tensions and changes in the way Chinese markets – and their reliance on labor and land in particular – operate today. Publications from this project have appeared in Gender & Society, Journal of Peasant Studiesand The China Quarterly. Research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the ZEIT-Stiftung Bucerius Foundation.

Her next project focuses on new forms of transnational migration out of China, where recent market destabilization has led private individuals to look abroad, whether through real estate investment or through outright emigration.