This space includes materials of John Mok’s Research Program.The research aims at studying how religions survivie under authoritarianism. The case in focus is the Catholic Church in south China under Xi Jinping's administration. This project It intends to build a framework of resistance by revisiting James Scott’s concept of infrapolitics, and drawing resources from the scholarship of social movements that studies high-risk contention.
My research centers on how migrants make and think of home, and how this shapes the lives of individuals in their home communities. In particular, I study the forms of expertise that are involving in caring for animals and land as ways that migrants participate in their community of origin. Some of the questions my research pursues include: How do migrants' experiences and expertise have material consequences on the landscapes and infrastructures of their home community? How do people share knowledge and expertise across borders?
I am a PhD student in the Anthropology department at University of California, Irvine. Previously, I was a student at New York University and the University of Southern California. I migrated to the United States with my family as a young teen and since then, I have been living in Southern California.
My work is centered around the formation of civic data about vulnerable communities, primarily focused on the practices of categorizing and classifying transportation and pollution data in in Southern California. My work is committed to furthering research on civic infrastructures and human-computer-interaction by revealing the complex data economy among emerging transportation infrastructures, such as Uber and Lyft, and its social consequences. I am particularly interested in how information infrastructures, while making certain data visible, selectively renders others opaque.
This essay describes Isabelle Soifer's research.
