People

Maggy was formerly a student at HKU Sociology (1983-1989) and the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge (1989-1992), a criminal justice researcher at the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence in London (1992-1996), and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at University of Essex in the UK (1996-2005).

She returned to HKU in 2005 and has published extensively in sociology and criminology, engaging with key policy debates and pushing conceptual boundaries especially in the field of crime and control. She has served as an expert adviser to the German government organisation Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and local NGOs on gender-responsive community policing in Bangladesh. Her work on human trafficking and control has become a key reference point in scholarly and international policy debates and has been included at the parallel event of the 7th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council and on the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking Hub. Maggy is also an Associate Editor on Theoretical Criminology and Policing and Society and a member on the International Advisory Board of a number of journals, including Crime, Media and Culture, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, and the Oxford University Press monograph series Clarendon Series in Criminology. She was a member of the ESRC Research Grant Peer Review Committee in the UK and currently serves as a member on the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel, Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

Professor Pun Ngai received her PhD from University of London, SOAS in 1998. She is the winner of 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 book, widely read in Hong Kong and Mainland China.

Professor George C.S. Lin received his Ph.D. degree in Human Geography from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 1994; MA in Urban Geography from the University of Akron, Ohio, USA, 1989; MSc in Economic Geography from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, 1984; BSc in City Planning from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, 1981.

He is the author of Red Capitalism in South China: Growth and Development of the Pearl River Delta (University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, Canada, 1997), Developing China: Land, Politics, and Social Conditions (Routledge, London, 2009), co-author of China's Urban Space: Development under Market Socialism (Routledge, London, 2007), and over 90 articles published in internationally refereed journals and books.

His research interests include China's urban development and urbanization, land use and land management, the growth of urbanism, rural industrialization and regional development in the Pearl River Delta, transnationalism, cross-border population mobility, and the geography of Chinese diaspora.

Dr Tom MacDonald is a media anthropologist dedicated to using ethnographic engagement to achieve a richer understanding of how digital technologies, media and material culture come to mediate ongoing transformations in the communicative practices, economic behaviours, social relationships and human subjectivities of people in China and beyond.

His first solely-authored monograph, Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks (2016, UCL Press), details the findings of 15-months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Chinese countryside, examining how social media use reconfigures social relations and morality. A separate co-authored volume, How the World Changed Social Media (2016, UCL Press) expands on the wider findings of the larger comparative UCL Why We Post study, to which his ethnography formed a central contribution.

His research increasingly focuses on economic concerns, reflecting the rapid convergence between digital money and media in China. His current project examines the adoption of digital money platforms amongst migrant factory workers in China and documents the effects such platforms on a range of everyday exchange practices and infrastructures, with a particular focus on consumption, savings, investment, and remittances.

Dr Tommy Tse is an Assistant Professor in Media and Culture at the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong. He specialises in East Asia’s media and cultural industries, creative labour, consumer culture and sociology of fashion. His work has appeared in Asian Journal of Business Research (MAGScholar), Clothing Cultures (Intellect), Information, Communication and Society (Taylor & Francis), International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education (Taylor & Francis), International Journal of Fashion Studies (Intellect), Journal of Business Anthropology (Copenhagen Business School Open Journals), Journal of Consumer Culture (Sage), Young Consumers (Emerald) and The International Sociological Association E-Symposium (Sage), in addition to his co-authored book Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia: Use of Celebrity and Its Influence on Society, Culture and Communication (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2017[Distribution]).

Previously, Tse worked in various media and creative companies, including Art Map Ltd., ADO and TBWA. Tse also worked as a project-based copywriter for various global fashion, luxury and pharmaceutical brands for over six years. Before joining HKU, Tse taught at the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University; Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; the Culture and Media Domain, HKU SPACE; and Hong Kong Design Institute.

From 2015 – 2017, Tse was the Director of the faculty’s flagship summer institute Asia as the Global Future: an annual four-week study programme in Hong Kong (HKU), Beijing (Peking University) and Seoul (Korea University) showcasing the Faculty of Social Sciences and HKU as an Asia’s global university, and an ideal platform for international collaboration, academic exchange and social innovation among the global partner universities. In 2015, Tse was the Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Radio and Television Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing, and at the Fashion Institute of Design, Donghua University, Shanghai. In 2018, he is a Visiting Scholar/Research Associate at University College London (Anthropology Department) and London College of Fashion (Social and Cultural Studies).

Dr Julia Shu-Huah Wang's research focuses on social welfare policies, poverty alleviation interventions, immigration policies, and the well-being of families. She is currently working on several research projects, including impacts of social assistance policies on families; impacts of immigration policies; poverty dynamics and social safety nets in Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and the US; community-level poverty alleviation interventions (e.g., asset development programs and co-operatives) in Uganda and mainland China; and the policy advocacy education model in Hong Kong. Dr Wang is a licensed social worker in Taiwan and a registered social worker in Hong Kong. She has practice experience working with families and children, and she also has experience in advocacy, policy analysis, and program evaluation.

Dr Junxi Qian is a social and cultural geographer who works at the intersection of geography, urban studies and cultural studies. He holds a BSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Sun Yat- sen University, China (2010), and a PhD in Human Geography from University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2013). Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Singapore Management University, Singapore, advised by Prof Lily Kong.

Dr Junxi Qian’s research interests include place politics, urban public space, modernity, religion, China's ethnic minorities/frontiers, and China's recent urban transformation. Most of his published works partake in one or several of these themes.