Lu Zhang, Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies
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Dr. Lu Zhangis an Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Temple University. Her research and teaching focus on globalization, labor and labor movements, development, sociology of work, and the political economy of China and East Asia. Her work has utilized ethnographic and interview-based methods. Lu holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Warwick.
Lu is interested in the dynamism of global capitalism and the ways in which its transformations are reshaping the nature and landscape of work and employment, producing divergent forms of oppression and resistance, and recurrently creating its own crises at global, national, local, and shop-floor levels. Her first book, Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015), explores the conditions, subjectivity, and collective actions of autoworkers in the world’s largest and fastest-growing automobile manufacturing nation. Based on years of fieldwork and extensive interviews conducted at seven large auto factories in various regions of China, the book provides an inside look at the daily factory life of autoworkers and a deeper understanding of the roots of rising labor unrest in the auto industry. The book has received two book awards from the American Sociological Association. The German translation of the book (translated by Ralf Ruckus) was published in 2018.
Lu is currently working on her second book, which explores how capital relocation interacts with labor politics and local development through a comparative case study of geographical relocation of four electronics multinationals from China’s coastal regions to its interior.
Other pieces of her research have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Review of International Political Economy, Development and Change, Labor History, Work in the Global Economy, International Journal of Sociology, and International Labor and Working-Class History.
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Email: lu.zhang1@temple.edu