Shining Wang

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. As a cultural sociologist, I study how internal structures and features of cultural forms give them the capacity to shape meaning and social order, and how this capacity is enabled, constrained, and transformed under changing historical conditions. My current regional focus is contemporary China. 

My dissertation examines how historical cultural forms are mobilized, reinterpreted, and reconstructed in contemporary Chinese society. I use content analysis, interviews, and participant observation to study a grassroots cultural revival in contemporary China—the Hanfu Movement. I focus on three cultural forms: classical Chinese imperial discourse, Han clothing, and traditional Confucian ritual. I explore how these forms, once detached from the historical settings that sustained them, are made meaningful and how they may reorganize social life under modern conditions characterized by the establishment of modern nation-states and fragmentation and pluralization of meaning.

My peer-reviewed article, “Object Grammar: Interpretive Divergences and Redirection around a National Object in Contemporary China’s Hanfu Movement,” is forthcoming in Theory and Social Inquiry.

Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I received my B.A. in Sociology, with a minor in Chinese language and literature, from Fudan University in 2021.

My CV is available here. You can also find my ORCID record here.