research

Live-commerce merges livestreaming with e-commerce. Hosts sell on camera while monitoring real-time dashboards that track every viewer click, comment, and purchase. Selling becomes data-driven performance.

Dancing with Metrics: Digitalization of Women's Labor in China

PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan (writing in progress)

Committee: Greta Krippner (Chair), Paige Sweet, Roi Livne, Lisa Nakamura (Digital Studies)

Since the reform era, Chinese capitalism has remade women's labor in its own image. The socialist factory demanded their bodies on the assembly line. The post-reform service economy demanded their affects at the counter. Now, platform capitalism demands something new: their faces, voices, and personalities—rendered into data and optimized in real time. My dissertation examines this transformation through China's trillion-dollar live-commerce industry—the global frontier of platform-mediated selling and the largest employer of women in China's digital economy. Behind the glamorous "influencer" label is a vast workforce of 38 million streamers, the majority earning minimum wage while algorithmic systems govern their every move.

Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, 141 interviews with streamers chasing visibility, managers chasing metrics, platforms chasing growth—and embedded observation as a livestreaming assistant, I open the black box of metrics. I show that power has shifted—from the physical discipline of the factory floor, from the managerial gaze of the service counter—into platform infrastructure itself. My research examines how data-driven measurement systems produce new forms of labor stratification, with implications for class formation and social reproduction under digital capitalism.

My dissertation receives support from:

— Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship (recognizes pathbreaking dissertation

research pursuing bold and innovative approaches)

— AAS-Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship

— Boyd/Williams Dissertation Fellowship for Research on Women and Work

— International Institute Research Grant

— Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies Grant

— Rackham Graduate School Fellowship

Peer-Reviewed Articles & Manuscripts

Artificial Intelligence: Automation, Emotional Work, and Gender

"Constructing Replaceability: Authenticity Regimes and the Automation of Emotional Labor" R&R Work and Occupations

— 2025 Best Student Paper Award, ASA CITAMS Section

— 2025 Best Student Paper Award, LaborTech Network (Honorable Mention)

"Doing Data, Doing Gender: How Gendered AI is Produced through Optimization Loop" Minor revision Big Data & Society

“Verify You Are Human: The Automation Proof Paradox Under the Specter of AI” Co-author with Mengyang Zhao (writing in progress)

Platform Economy: Infrastructure, Inequality, and Social Change

“Selling Live: Metrics Architecture and the Reorganization of Service Work in China” (manuscript available)

— 2026 Early Career Workshop Award, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics

“Mushrooms at the End of Algorithms: How Livestreaming E-commerce Bypasses Rural Farmers in China's Poverty Alleviation” Co-author with Tiantian Liu (writing in progress)

The Political Economy of Work-Family Separation

"Boundary Labor: The Regulatory Demand of Performing Work-family Separation in Blurred Workplaces" (under review)

— 2025 Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award, ASA Sex & Gender Section
— 2022 Best Student Paper in Economic Sociology & Entrepreneurship, ASA Economic Sociology Section
— 2022 Cheryl Allyn Miller Award for Research on Women and Work, Sociologists for Women in Society
— 2022 McGuigan Prize for Best Graduate Essay in Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Michigan
— 2020 Raymond Fogelson Award for Best Master’s Thesis, Ethnological & Historical Sciences, University of Chicago