Haitong Xu is a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology and the College. Xu’s main research interests include community, communication, urban sociology and cultural sociology. His dissertation discusses the internal social dynamics of community gardens in Philadelphia by studying how gardeners build and maintain a sense of community despite limited face-to-face social interactions. The study argues that non-verbal interactions play a key role in shaping the sense of community in spaces characterized by physical isolation. It also shows that an interaction’s accessibility is not only determined by its content, but also by its form. Xu’s current ongoing research project explores the learning experience of museum visitors, examining the correlation between pre-existing knowledge and museum experience across different socioeconomic and cultural groups.