Prof. PUN Ngai 潘毅
Chair Professor, Head of Department
Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development
Location: Room 131, Ho Sin Hang Building 何善衡樓131室
Phone: (852) 2616 7429
Fax: (852) 2572 5170
Email: npun@ln.edu.hk
- Biography
Pun Ngai received her Ph.D. from the University of London, SOAS in 1998. She is the winner of the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for her book, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). Made in China is widely used as required reading in major universities in America, Europe, and Asia. Together with Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), these two texts have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Chinese. Two of her Chinese books were also awarded Hong Kong Book Prize 2007 and 2011 as the top ten popular books, widely read in Hong Kong and Mainland China.
She published extensively and cross-disciplinary in top-tier journals in the areas of Cultural Studies, China Studies, Labor Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology. Her articles appeared in Positions, Public Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Global Labor Studies, Work, Employment and Society, The China Quarterly, Modern China, and The China Journal, Cultural Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Sociological Review, Sociology, etc.
- Education
Ph.D., University of London, SOAS
M.Phil.,The University of Hong Kong
B.A. The Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Selected Publication
Most representative publications in recent five years:
Pun, Ngai and Jack Qiu (2020), “‘Emotional authoritarianism’: state, education and the mobile working-class subjects”, Mobilities, Volume 15(4): 620-634.
Pun, N., Tse, T., Shin, V., & Fan, L. (2020). “Conceptualising Socio-Economic Formations of Labour and Workers’ Power in Global Production Networks”. Sociology, DOI: 0038038520908779.
Bryant Hui, Pun ,Ngai, Anita Koo and Jack Qiu (2020) “Having Less but Giving More: Work Experience and Prosocial Behavior of Chinese Working-Class Youth”, by Youth and Society, 52(8), 1582-1601.
Pun, Ngai. (2020). The new Chinese working class in struggle. Dialectical Anthropology, 44(4), 319-329.
Pun, Ngai, Rutvica Andrijasevic, and Devi Sacchetto (2019) Transgressing North-South divide: Foxconn Production Regimes in China and the Czech Republic. Critical Sociology, 46(2) 307–322.
Pun, Ngai, & Koo Anita. (2019). Double contradiction of schooling: Class reproduction and working class agency at vocational schools in China. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40, 50–64.
Pun, Ngai, Tommy Tse, and Kenneth Ng. “Challenging digital capitalism: SACOM’s campaigns against Apple and Foxconn as monopoly capital.” Information, Communication & Society 22.9 (2019): 1253-1268.
Benny Lu, Anita Koo and Pun Ngai (2019) “Transgressing neoliberal value: constructing a micro-foundation of social values of working-class youth in vocational schools”, Sociological Review. 2019, Vol. 67(5) 1050–1065.
Most representative publications beyond the recent five-year period:
Smith, Chris and Pun, Ngai (2018) “Precarity and Class in China: An Unhappy Coupling”, Work, Employment and Society. 32 (3): 599–615.
Pun, Ngai (2016) Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China. New York and London: Polity Press.
Pun, Ngai, SHEN Yuan, GUO Yuhua, LU Huilin, Jenny Chan & Mark Selden. 2016. “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese workers’ struggles from a global labor perspective.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17(2): 166-185.
Pun, Ngai, and Anita Koo (2015) “A ‘World-Class’ (Labor) Camp/us: Foxconn and China’s new generation of labour migrants.” positions 23(3): 411–436.
Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan (2013), “The Spatial Politics of Labor in China: Life, Labor, and a New Generation of Migrant Workers”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:1, 179–190.
Pun Ngai (2012), “Gender and Class: Women’s Working Lives in a Dormitory Labor Regime in China”, International Labor and Working-Class History , 81, Spring 2012, 178–181.
Pun, Ngai and Jenny Chan (2012) “Global Capital, the State and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience”, Modern China. 38(4) 383–410.
Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin (2010), “Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China”, Modern China , 36 (5):493–519.
Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin (2010), “A Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontracting System and Collective Actions by Construction Workers in Post-Socialist China”, The China Journal .No. 64, pp. 143–158.
Pun Ngai and Chris King-chi Chan (2008), “The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China”, Boundary 2, Vol 35, No 2,pp. 75–91.
Pun, Ngai and Smith Chris (2007), “Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place: Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China”, Work, Employment and Society, Vol 21, No 1, pp. 27–46.
Pun Ngai (2007), “The Dormitory Labor Regime: Sites of Control and Resistance for Women Migrant Workers in South China”, Feminist Economics , Volume 13, Issue 3, 2007,pp. 239–258.
Pun, Ngai (2005) Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press.
Pun, Ngai (2003), “Subsumption or Consumption?: The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in Globalizing China”, Cultural Anthropology, 18(4), November,pp. 469–492.
Pun, Ngai (2002), “Global Capital, Local Gaze and Social Trauma in China”, Public Culture 14(2): 341-347.
Pun, Ngai (2000), “Opening a Minor Genre of Resistance in Reform China: Scream, Dream and Transgression in a Workplace”, Positions , 8:2,pp. 1–24.
- Current Research
The research term currently works on a Collaborative Research Fund (CRF), “Social Media and Migrant Labor Protection in Mainland China” (2016-2019) UST and CUHK. This project aims to synergize macro theories of traditional social sciences which looks at capital, state, and class formation at the abstract level with micro theories of media and cultural studies that focus on life-world, everyday practices, and new forms of communication and resistance. Inspired by the theory of digitally networked action, and informed by globalization and state theory, this project inspires to create an innovative paradigm to merge rich sociological debates with media studies so as to explore new forms of working-class youth culture and novel platforms of labor rights protection. Moving beyond traditional models of trade unionism and labor NGOs, this project contributes to a new exploration of attempting vocational schools as sites of learning, communicating and organizing, and preparing students to be proper working-class subjects.