About
Weirong Guo is the inaugural Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University in 2023, and a B.A. and M.A. in sociology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China in 2014 and 2017. As a cultural and political sociologist, she adopts a comparative and transnational approach, coupled with mixed methods, to study the Asian diaspora and global China.
Her work has been published in Cultural Sociology and Social Psychology Quarterly, among other journals, and received several best paper awards. She is also a co-editor of Cultural Sociology: Classics & Frontiers, the first Chinese-language anthology that introduces to the Chinese audience the latest developments in cultural sociology in North America.
Her dissertation and book project, titled “Home Is Where I Stand”: A Comparative Study of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Among Chinese Students in the United States and China, examines how Chinese students negotiate their racial, national, and global identities amid the rise of anti-Asian racism and the difficult China-U.S. geopolitics. Drawing on comparative ethnographic work at three universities in the U.S. and China, over 100 in-depth interviews, and text analysis of news articles, she addresses why and how some Chinese students can develop supranational or cosmopolitan identification, whereas others remain apolitical or become more nationalistic.
Beyond her research, Dr. Guo is also an award-winning teacher. She was the recipient of the Graduate Student Teaching Award and the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship from Emory University.
You can find her latest CV here.
Photo Credit: Keyu Chen
Work Highlights
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Cultural Sociology in General
Bin Xu, Licheng Qian, and Weirong Guo. 2019. “The Cultural Sociology of China: Trajectory and Dynamics of a Burgeoning Field.” Cultural Sociology.
Yi Zhou, Weirong Guo, Yajun Zheng, and Junchao Tang (Eds). 2022. Cultural Sociology: Classics & Frontiers. Peking University Press.
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Culture and Health
Weirong Guo, and Bin Xu. 2022. “Dignity in Red Envelopes: Disreputable Exchange and Cultural Reproduction of Inequality in Informal Medical Payment.” Social Psychology Quarterly.
Weirong Guo. 2018. “Whose ‘Hongbao’ to Take: A Study of the Informal Transactions between Doctors and Patients with a Cultural Approach.” Sociological Journal (社会学刊).
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Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Among Chinese International Students
Book project: “Home Is Where I Stand”: A Comparative Study of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Among Chinese Students in the United States and China
Work in progress: “’Politics is Dangerous’: Why Chinese College Students in the United States and China Struggle to Avoid Politics.”
Work in progress: “‘I Call Many Places Home‘: How Chinese International Students in the United States Understand and Practice Cosmopolitanism.“
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Political Culture in Contemporary China
Weirong Guo, and Zhengfen Wang. 2015. “Positions in the ‘System’ and Views on Social Change: A Comparative Analysis of Three Types of Middle-Class Professionals in China.” Journal of Gansu Administration Institute (甘肃行政学院学报).
Work in progress: Weirong Guo, and Weihua An. “Whom to Trust, State or Society? The Differentiated Trust in Contemporary China.”
Contact me
weirongg@sas.upenn.edu
Asian American Studies Program
3718 Locust Walk
473 McNeil Building
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA