Education

Ph.D. Brown university
A.M. Brown University
B.A. Johns Hopkins University

Areas of Specialization

• Political Sociology
• Development
• Citizenship
• Labor
• Civil Society
• Dynamics of Capitalism

Research

Irene Pang is a political sociologist who studies issues of labor, citizenship, and rights contestation in contemporary China and India. Her ongoing research examines how low-income internal migrant construction workers in Beijing and Delhi navigate relations with capital, the state, and civil society in their struggle to achieve substantive citizenship beyond its formal bureaucratic status. This work engages with and speaks to academic debates on precarious labor, civil society, and the dynamics of capitalism, and draws on ethnographic data collected from two years of fieldwork funded by the National Science Foundation (US), the ZEIT-Stiftung (Germany), as well as the Watson Institute and the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University.

Publications

Irene Pang. 2018. “The Legal Construction of Precarity: Lessons from the Construction Sectors in Beijing and Delhi.” Critical Sociology. Advance online publication. 

Irene Pang. 2016. “Banking is for Others: Contradictions of Microfinance in the Ghanaian Market.” Journal of World-Systems Research 22(2):335-66.*

* Winner of Terence K. Hopkins Graduate Student Paper Award, American Sociological Association, Political Economy of the World-System Section

Teaching

• IS 830 Analytical Approaches for International Studies
• IS 319 Chinese Development and its Discontents