Postgraduate Students

Samuel I. Cabbuag is a PhD Sociology student at the Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is also an Assistant Professor (on study leave) of Sociology at the University of the Philippines Diliman where he finished both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. His research interests include digital sociology, cultural sociology, media and cultural studies, digital cultures, popular culture, and fan studies. He has published in the Philippine Sociological Review, Asian Politics & Policy, Plaridel, Katipunan, and Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal. His recent co-authored publications include a public report in collaboration with Internews entitled Understudied Digital Platforms in the Philippines, which investigated the information ecosystem of TikTok and WeChat, and a study on pseudonymous influencers in the Philippines and the complicities of influencer industries with disinformation.

CHEN Yanming is a PhD Sociology student from Fuzhou, China. He obtained a master’s degree in Communication Studies at Beijing Normal University after completing a B. A. in Journalism at Sichuan University. Broadly informed by media sociology, cultural studies and gender studies, he has developed wide research interests in marginal, informal and undiscovered social life in contemporary China, for example, memory construction of a university with fraught histories and gay men online dating. He is highly intrigued by meaning-making, negotiation, and conflicts in social interactions and also prefers to interrogate peripheral social facts in larger questions. This is why his PhD research plans to use ethnographic methods to empirically investigate female abandonment and family reconnection, with the context of (post-) One-child Policy. This tentative research enables him to critically understand modern Chinese history along with ongoing societal transformation by examining the intersectionality among culture, gender, family, social reproduction, morality and emotion. He also anticipates to engage in close dialogue with historical anthropology and South China studies. He would very much welcome researchers with similar research interests to discuss with him. 

DENG Gezhi is a full-time Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology. She holds an MSc Degree in Social Policy and Social Research from UCL, a Master of Public Policy from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a Bachelor in History from Nankai University. Multi-disciplinary learning allows her to discover more interesting entry points. She is interested in studying social stratification and mobility, sociology of education, and residential segregation. Her master’s dissertation focused on the ways in which family SES affects intergenerational mobility of education, and the differences in the size of its impact on different groups. Her recent research is about the impact of spatial inequality on educational outcomes. She mainly uses quantitative methods to conduct her research. 

Jiashan Han is a full time Ph.D Sociology student from Xi’an, China. She holds a Master of Social Science (M.S.S.) from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a Bachelor in Business Administration (BA) from Seattle University. She has traveled to 7 countries and has studied abroad in Canada, U.S., Guatemala, and Japan. She co-authored the paper, Mommy and Me: raising implicit followership theories, which was published in Industrial and Commercial Training. She has also presented at 2 international conferences, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) Annual Convention and the Global Followership Conference (GFC). She specializes in Gender, Women, and LGBTQ studies. Her current research topic focuses on gendered educational system in China which has a tendency reinforcing masculinity over femininity. She is interested in studying gender inequality, institutional sex segregation, and how gender issues intertwine with social changes.