Hi! My name is Ann Jiang. I am a Sociology PhD Student at UC San Diego. I study the political culture of polarization that sits at the intersection of Sociology and Political Science. Leveraging a range of cases, I am especially drawn to emerging social relations that are contested and boundary-forming. Specifically, public opinion on immigration in the U.S. has been my primary case of focus. I am affiliated with multidisciplinary spaces such as UCSD Political Science’s Racial and Ethnic Politics Lab and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.

At the heart of my research agenda is the question: How do macro- and meso-level forces (like the relational and the structural) shape the public’s micro-level meaning-making of who’s “us” and who’s “them”? How does macro polarization enter group life? How do people conceptualize, contend with, and contest boundaries of social difference in this era of political volatility and institutional erosion?  

This research agenda initially emerged from a passion project I self-started after obtaining my B.A. in Philosophy, which I continued to develop as my M.A. Thesis in Sociology at the University of Chicago and my current doctoral study. The thesis, which argues for a networked nature of sexuality, has recently received the Best Graduate Student Paper Award in Sociology of Sexualities at the American Sociological Association.

My doctoral project focuses on the evolving social relations within immigration debates in the United States. It investigates the 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 their political attitudes and moral worlds are formed in an era of polarization and how exclusion operates within seemingly unified categories. Methodologically, I have developed projects using large-scale survey data, computational text analysis, and interviews. My enthusiasm for sociological research methodology drives me to use a plurality of methods.