Dr Yuchen Yang

I guess it's worth redesigning this module from scratch even though I did not get the proper workload allocation 🥺

Lecture notes for Sociology of Everyday Life

Photo of a PC monitor in a lecture hall displaying the final week's lecture slides

After 3 semesters, I finally taught a module that I'm satisfied with! In redesigning this module, I made a deliberate effort to cultivate core academic skills, and now many of my 1st-year students in the module are doing WAY BETTER than our current 3rd years!

Public understanding and attitudes to irregular migration in the UK - I-CLAIM This report summarises findings from the February 2025 I-CLAIM survey of 1,147 UK adults, exploring public knowledge of irregular migration, how people define it, and their attitudes toward irregular ...

Today we published a report on public understanding & attitudes to #irregularmigration in the UK.
this is my a one-line summary:
strong opinions, wrong facts.
But there is so much more to it. Ultimately the picture is much more nuanced and complex...
i-claim.eu/project/publ...

Iconicity!!! #Cat #Peirce #Semiotics

New paper out in The British Journal of Sociology!🎉 @lsesociology.bsky.social

Based on my doctoral research on young carers in China, we explore children’s emotional labour and the moral tensions that shape their everyday caregiving experiences.

🔗 Open access: doi.org/10.1111/1468...

But on a side note, the Smith/Hoang pairing comes from my answer to my Theory Prelim Exam 7 years ago, for which we were asked to pair a theorist we learned in our History of Social Theory class and put it into dialogue with a UChicago faculty whose work we also read in that class!

It's probably not a coincident that all of the core readings are connected to Berkeley in some way . . .

In Week 10, we will wrap up the module by considering methods that help us attend to the connection between the "micro" and the "macro." We will compare Burawoy's Extended Case Method with Smith's Institutional Ethnography, and then zoom into Hoang's ethnography of global sex work as an example.

Society as Sy-meow-ic Interaction 🐱 #SymbolicInteraction #Sociology #AcademicSky #Cat

So interesting!!!

In Week 9, we'll examine what happens when a puzzling "surprise" happens in everyday interaction. I shamelessly assigned my own article on feminist parents' accounts for their kids' *gender-stereotypical interests* and paired it with Chase Raymond's article on "Category Accounts."

Happening soon!!!

Almost cried during course prepping 😭😭😭

New paper out in Qualitative Inquiry! 🎉

In this study, we explore power relations between researchers from elite institutions & participants often seen as ‘vulnerable’, proposing a framework for ethical reflection.

📖 Open Access here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Congratulations!!! 🎉🎉🎉

Join us on Friday for the next talk in our How to Write and Publish Theory series, featuring Dr. Yuchen Yang (@dr-yang.bsky.social) on the development and publication of his award-winning ST article, “Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender.”

Sign up: ucla.zoom.us/j/91370822602

The art worlds of gender performance: cosplay, embodiment, and the collective accomplishment of gender - The Journal of Chinese Sociology In recent years, cosplay has gained global visibility as a performing art in which fans dress up as fictional characters from anime, comics/manga, or games. Although scholars contend that cosplay exem...

As a big fan of Japanese anime, I believe animation theory is one of the most exciting theories that emerged in the social sciences in the last two decades, although it can be traced back to Goffman. I've tried to engage with it in my article on gender-crossing cosplay: doi.org/10.1186/s407...

In Week 8, we will reflect on the methodologies and theories for studying online interactions. We will read @peterforberg.com and Schilt's comparison of digital vs analog ethnographies, and Manning and @structureless.bsky.social's comparison of animation vs performance models of/for human action.

After the reading week, we turn our focus to online interactions in Week 7. Showcasing articles by Ross ("Being Real on Fake Instagram") and Zhao ("Intrapersonal Interactions on Social Media"), this week asks, how is the construction of self in online spaces related to/divergent from offline spaces?

Thrilled to see that my articles are among the 10 most-read articles in Sociological Theory in the last 6 months (2nd & 8th respectively) 🥰
Gender Uptake: doi.org/10.1177/0735...
What's Hegemonic about Hegemonic Masculinity: doi.org/10.1177/0735...

おめでとう～🎉🎉🎉

Had a great time talking to European linguistic anthropologists about the problems/limits of "positionality statements"! #ELAN #LinguisticAnthropology #Ethnomethodology #ConversationAnalysis

YouTube video by languagejones Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??

A nice look back at Labov's "Department Store" study (one of the foundational sociolinguistic studies) by one of his last students. If you're a linguist or have learned about the study in a linguistics class, this is worth a watch.

youtu.be/cK6g53lLgnw?...

Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender - Yuchen Yang, 2025 “Doing Gender” is often read as a theory of how people signify femininity/masculinity via expressive “performances.” This prevailing interpretation falls short ...

And here's the link to this article: doi.org/10.1177/0735...

This article was born out of a question I had since my sophomore year in college. I'm so thrilled to have the opportunity to share this backstory through the ASA Theory Section later this month!!!

Just realized it's been 15 years since I started playing the bass 😲 So I bought a Jack Casady semi-hollow bass to celebrate 🤩

In Week 5, we will step back from ethnography and return to #ConversationAnalysis and #MembershipCategorizationAnalysis. I assigned articles by @kevinawhitehead.bsky.social and @tianhao.bsky.social and am excited to explore how people manage "racial commonsense" in everyday life with my students!

Wearing my favorite sweater to work. Can I blend in with the undergrads?

And then, after you paid the high Immigration Health Surcharge, you'll learn the health service you get from NHS is literally a piece of sh*t and you may need to fly back to your home country to get the basic treatment/exams you need 🙄

People are starting to acknowledge that the (AI) emperor has no clothes.