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.
Hong Jin Jo studies the motivations behind individuals' participation in the educational race and the mechanisms through which they acquire and reproduce their class status. His research explores the influence of global and local social changes on individual educational mobility actions, employing mixed-methods with a strong emphasis on qualitative approaches, such as in-depth interviews and ethnographic methods. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the historical transformation of international student mobility to U.S. higher education, using South Korea as a case study. The dissertation reveals the pursuit of international education credentials and argues that this pursuit is driven by locally motivated global strategies. Jo earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2024.
Learn more about Hong Jin: https://hongjin.imweb.me/
A political and comparative-historical sociologist, Yueran Zhang specializes in the comparative studies of capitalism(s), socialism(s), and transitions in between, with a special emphasis on political economy and the dynamics of development in the Global South.
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Bernard Koch is a sociologist with research interests in the science of science; culture; cultural evolution; AI ethics; and computational social science.
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Esma Ozel Alothman is a critical sociologist whose work focuses on how educational policies shape private decision making about schooling and educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. She explores this question in her dissertation research by examining how families navigate the transition from middle school to high school in Turkey, an illustrative country characterized by drastic, uncertainty-inducing secondary education policies. Using an interpretive approach, her research underscores the situated and improvised nature of parents’ educational strategies in volatile schooling contexts. Alothman received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2022 and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University.
Linda Zhao research networks and neighborhoods, specifically how they relate to inequality and intergroup dynamics in three substantive areas: immigrant integration, policing, and health.
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Professor Brenner is a critical urban theorist, sociologist and geographer whose research focuses on cities and urbanization within the social sciences, the environmental humanities, the design disciplines and environmental studies.
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Professor Go’s research explores the social logics of imperial formations and modern colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. Read more about his work here.
