Research Statement

My work circles a single question: how does collective identity form, hold, divide, and travel? States narrate, platforms filter, individuals participate. The puzzle is not durability alone. People who know the costs, who can name the inequality and the censorship, might identify no less strongly than those who do not, which suggests identity tracks the narrative frame events are placed in rather than the information available about them. Yet within a single discourse event, framings also multiply and compete, some stabilizing, others quickly displaced. I want to understand both face: why identity holds firm along some axes while it churns along others, and what decides which framings survive.

I approach this question from several angles. They did not unfold in a straight line; sometimes one project ran into a limit that pushed me toward the next, and sometimes a public event or a shift in the international landscape pulled my attention somewhere new.

Across Several Domains

Intellectual history. My undergraduate thesis examined how Japan’s Hua-Yi distinction and Western international law jointly constructed the modern imagination of “Asia.” Asianism positioned itself as a counter-thesis to Eurocentric universalism, but it reproduced the spatial-order logic it claimed to transcend: a failed antithesis. The structural entrapment I found there (frameworks shaping actors even as those actors try to oppose them) set the question I have pursued since.

Macro-behavioral observation. A synthetic control study of China’s Double Reduction policy tried to use satellite nighttime light as an objective proxy for student activity. Three identification strategies failed; a follow-up Shanghai GIS exercise showed that VIIRS data at 463-meter resolution cannot separate student behavior from urban infrastructure lighting. The project taught a lesson about matching data to questions. Nighttime light is a strong proxy for economic activity and urbanization, but at 463-meter resolution it cannot isolate something as fine-grained as student study activity from the infrastructure lighting around it. What looked like a clean behavioral signal dissolved, under scrutiny, into seasonality, urbanization, and measurement noise.

Micro-level digital expression. A study of the 2025 “Mourning Ming” wave on Xiaohongshu asked which narrative directions within a single discourse event face differential search-visibility friction. The finding was layered and counterintuitive: feminist-lineage framing and Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng) material were the most robustly associated with reduced visibility, more so than the anti-Manchu revisionism one might expect to be most sensitive. Platform governance operates through friction rather than deletion, and the friction is not where conventional accounts of Chinese censorship would predict.

International relations. A literature review for a graduate seminar asked how nationalist identity gets transmitted into concrete economic policy, in trade, investment, and coercion. Mapping a fragmented field surfaced an opening that interests me: how historical-trauma narratives and ontological security may shape what states do. This was the same question of identity seen at the scale of states rather than texts or platforms, another vantage on how narratives become action.

Current and Future Work

The current projects bring these strands together. A course proposal asked whether patriotic education achieves broad coverage of official nationhood premises without comparable integration of their logical dependencies. My M.A. thesis proposal extends this: using the Mourning Ming wave as a diagnostic case, it tests whether ordinary citizens actually rely on the Qing-continuity premise the state treats as load-bearing when justifying territorial integrity, or whether they reach for entirely different reasons. Both projects draw directly on the intellectual-historical groundwork of my Asianism thesis and the measurement lessons of the platform studies.

Methodological Growth

My trajectory has moved from pure intellectual history (close reading, Schmitt, Maruyama, Foucault) through large-scale empirical work (satellite data, synthetic control, web scraping, LLM-assisted content coding) toward the recognition that neither approach alone is sufficient. The questions I care about require combining archival and conceptual analysis with computational methods. Not because mixed methods are intrinsically better, but because identity formation sits at the intersection of historically inherited frameworks and present-day individual cognition, and no single method reaches both.

Gender runs through my work as a sustained concern. In the Xiaohongshu study, the feminist-lineage direction (the claim that maternal descent is the unbroken line of legitimacy) was the single most stable predictor of reduced search visibility, more so than the ethnic-classificatory or temporal-causal framings the existing literature treats as most sensitive. I read this as evidence that the narratives organizing national identity are gendered at their foundation: the patrilineal assumption beneath “continuity” may be more politically load-bearing, and more actively policed, than the categories of nation or ethnicity it appears to serve.

This points to a question I have not resolved. Class, nation, and gender are often ranked, with gender asked to wait, or treated as a distraction from the categories that supposedly do the real historical work. I am increasingly persuaded the ranking runs the other way: that these “load-bearing” categories have long organized themselves by suppressing gender as an axis of analysis. Yet I do not think the axes can be cleanly ordered once and for all. When nationalist victim-narratives and gendered ones compete for the same moral ground, as in debates over wartime memory, no stable priority holds. In my future research, working out how to hold these axes together, analytically without forcing a permanent hierarchy and practically without losing the ability to take a position, is the problem I most want to pursue, and it returns to the same question: how collective identity is built, and whose self-understanding gets to count as the durable one.