Research
My current research focuses on the politics of data-driven governance and quantification.
Research clusters
Recent publications
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2026
Data have power. As such, most discussions of data presume that records should mirror some idealized ground truth. Deviations are viewed as failure. Drawing on two ethnographic studies of state data-making—in a Chinese street-level bureaucrat agency and at the US Census Bureau—we show how seemingly "fake" state data perform institutional work. We map four moments in which actors negotiate between representational accuracy and organizational imperatives: creation, correction, collusion, and augmentation. Bureaucrats routinely privilege what data do over what they represent, creating fictions that serve civil servants' self-interest and enable constrained administrations. We argue that "fakeness" of state data is relational (context dependent), processual (emerging through workflows), and performative (brought into being through labeling and practice). We urge practitioners to center fitness-for-purpose in assessments of data and contextual governance. Rather than chasing impossible representational accuracy, sociotechnical systems should render the politics of useful fictions visible, contestable, and accountable.
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2026
The portrayal of China's Social Credit System (SCS) as an Orwellian scoring scheme through which the Communist Party controls citizens' every step proliferates in Western media, despite scholarship pointing out that it has little in common with the realities of SCSs in China. The imagined techno-dystopia informs policymaking, achieved meme status as it is invoked in broader debates around governance, technology, and geopolitics. Based on sociology of media, literature studies, and postcolonial theories, we argue that the SCS imaginary is indicative of Techno-orientalism, which supplements traditional Orientalism by emphasizing how a highly technologized Asian Other threatens the West. Previously only observed in works of fiction, we demonstrate how Techno-orientalism permeates fact-based news reporting, too. We analyze 405 SCS-related media articles published in the U.S. from 2002 to 2023 with regard to how the Chinese SCS is imagined, constructed, and deployed. The imagined techno-orient is useful: As a marker of the authoritarian threat in the digital age, it serves to reassure U.S. audiences that their own institutions are superior. As constructed case for technology gone bad, the SCS imaginary assists the U.S. debate to articulate own fears of losing control over technology, perceived authoritarian tendencies in domestic politics and the challenge of China's rise to the global order. The oriental Other, re-empowered and updated for the AI era with the help of the SCS imaginary, is the rhetorical device of choice for engaging with abstract future fears.
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2025
How can “China” serve as a productive analytical tool for understanding the relationship between artificial intelligence’s and society? This commentary proposes a conceptual typology to answer that question, offering four ways to use China as an analytical lens – China as Mirror, China as Prototype, China as Counterpoint, and China as Global Actor. Each concept illustrates how China’s particularities and global entanglements can help reframe core sociotechnical questions about AI’s political economy, labor, subject formation, ideology, and global circulation. This typology contributes to the decolonization of knowledge production in critical AI studies, ensuring that insights are co-generated globally and avoiding essentialized boundaries that hinder this effort.
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2025
To govern, states collect and evaluate information about citizens. This paper examines a social credit system (SCS) in China, a state initiative aimed at governing trust through the quantification of social behavior. Our analysis opens the ‘black box’ of an SCS metric, investigating how trust is translated into numbers and the implications of this translation. We reveal that the SCS is deeply relational and embedded in specific interests, biases, and logics of governance. The system has the potential to reinforce structural injustices and inequalities as it particularly disadvantages rural residents. Meanwhile, it subjects government employees to stricter surveillance, indicating its multifaceted objectives. Our finding uncovers the nuanced ways the system interacts with social stratification in Chinese society and the administrative structure inside the state. We problematize the individualistic, decontextualized, and behavioral assumptions undergirding the metric, and advocate for a critical reassessment of the sociopolitical dimensions of such quantitative governance infrastructures.
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2025
Governance by quantification has a long history in human society. However, two critical issues remain underexplored in the sociology of quantification. First, while the social conditions and consequences of governance by numbers have been widely addressed, the politics of the ‘middle ground’ – quantification infrastructure itself, particularly with the rise of digitalization – are not fully elaborated. Second, the power dynamics that underpin and shape institutionalized quantification politics remain understudied, as numeracy and statistics are always preceded by political judgments about what to measure and how. This symposium advances discussions on governance by quantification infrastructure by offering a critical, reflective perspective on state quantification infrastructures and shedding new light on contested issues in the sociology of quantification globally.