Date and Venue

October 29 (Tuesday) | 17:00-18:30 JST

In-person at Waseda University and Online via Zoom

REGISTRATION REQUIRED HERE

Room 712, Building 19, Waseda University

Event details:

Speaker:

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Professor Min Zhou (UCLA)

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Dr. Min Zhou, a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology & Asian America Studies (founding chair of the Department of Asian American Studies) and Director of the Asia Pacific Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the President of the Sociological Research Association (2024-25). She specializes in migration & development, race and ethnicity, the new second generation, Chinese diasporas, the sociology of Asia and Asian America, and urban sociology, and has published widely in these areas, including Chinatown (1992; 2024 Chinese edition), Growing up American (with Bankston, 1998), The Accidental Sociologist in Asian American Studies (2011), The Asian American Achievement Paradox (with Lee, 2015), The Rise of the New Second Generation (with Bankston, 2016), Contemporary Chinese Diasporas (ed., 2017), and Beyond Economic Migration (eds., with Mahmud, 2023). She was the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Career Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on International Migration and the 2020 Contribution to the Field Award of the ASA Section on Asia and Asian America.

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Abstract:

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Studies of international migration are concerned with two broad questions: one, why people move far away from their homeland and resettle in a new place; and two, once they arrive in this new place, how well they adapt to, or assimilate into, their host society. As to reasons of moving, most understandings center around two sets of pushing forces: either there is a general yearning for “a better life” or “more economic opportunities,” or there is trouble at home, such as wars, political unrest, famine, or natural disasters, that pushes people out. However, scholarship has often emphasized macro-level economic, political, or natural factors to the neglect of how these factors interact with migrants’ individual attributes, institutional mechanisms, and technological advancements to create sociocultural processes impacting migration. As to the consequences of moving, understandings have been built largely on migrant experiences of the Global North. This talk highlights recent empirical findings and the need for critically rethinking existing theories of migration and integration in the context of digital globalization.