Jun Zhou

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Society, and an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow.

As a scholar of labor, gender, and political economy, I use historical ethnography and social theory to examine how technological transformations reorganize gendered labor and reshape the futures women can plan.

My dissertation, which I am developing into a book titled Dancing with Metrics: The Digitalization of Women’s Labor in China, draws on multi-year ethnographic research in China’s live-commerce industry, the country’s largest platform labor markets for women. Setting this new work against earlier generations of women's labor in factory and service work, I argue that digital platforms remake the terms of both work and life, redistributing economic opportunity while making marriage and childbearing harder to plan.

My research appears in Work and Occupations and Big Data & Society. It has received nine best-paper awards, including awards from four sections of the American Sociological Association, and has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, among others.