Chuncheng Liu
I study the politics of data, quantification, and classification — how states and institutions turn people into numbers, and what happens when they do.
I am an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and of Sociology & Anthropology at Northeastern University, and affiliated faculty in its Global Asian Studies Program and Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England.
My current research investigates the politics of sociotechnical systems that surveil and classify citizens. I am a leading scholar of the Chinese social credit system project, and my book in progress is the first ethnography of the design and implementation of a municipal system that scores citizens with behavioral indicators. Using mixed methods, I have also studied contact-tracing apps, generative AI tools, and government data-driven systems. Previously, I examined how public health institutions classify sexual minorities and COVID-19, building on earlier work on HIV/AIDS research and intervention.
My work appears in Big Data & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Contemporary China, Social Science & Medicine, Sociological Forum, and Science, Technology & Human Values, with awards and funding from the American Sociological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. It has been featured in The Guardian, Bloomberg, and Rest of World.