Hi! My name is Ann Jiang. I am a Sociology PhD Student at UC San Diego. I study the intersection of culture, network, political sociology, and global sociology. Leveraging cases across domains, I am drawn to emerging, contested, and boundary-forming social relations.

At the core of my research is a question: how do relational contexts shape our understanding of social difference? When, and Why? We often define social differences by drawing boundaries—between “us” and “them”—and attaching meanings to each. Sometimes, in conflicting ways. These boundaries can exacerbate or mitigate inequality. To unpack this, I connect external processes (group formation, networks, politics, markets) with internal ones (perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions). This lens helps me analyze how people conceptualize, contend with, and contest boundaries around those categories of social differences (related to, e.g., immigration status, nationality, and race). For example, I have examined boundaries through sexualities by linking network embeddedness to one’s meaning-making strategies.

My doctoral project focuses on the evolving social relations within immigration debates in the United States. It investigates a puzzle: why do some immigrants align with anti-immigration ideologies in a far-right era? By shifting the focus from immigrant-native dynamics to intra-immigrant interactions, I show how networks shape political attitudes and how exclusion operates within seemingly unified categories.

Methodologically, I have developed projects using found surveys, computational text analysis, and interviews. My enthusiasm for sociological research methodology drives me to become a multi-methods researcher.