My research is not confined to one specific academic discipline. Instead, approaches used in different disciplines inform my research: the problem awareness and analytical methods used in sociology, the historical material used in historiography and the GIS technique used in geography. Therefore, my writings cut across many disciplines. In recent years, my research focuses on the issues concerning all ethnic groups in Taiwan. First, I reconstruct the locations, social networks of the 500 highland indigenous tribes before relocation and investigate the ways in which collective relocation policies disrupted the indigenous social networks since 1931. The current ongoing project analyzes the ways in which economic, educational and cultural characteristics of each tribe factor in the arrangement of relocation. The second theme of my research inspects the human interactions on the ethnic boundary where different ethnic groups met and habituated. At the moment I’ve completed the analysis of the foot-binding phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century and have started the work on the inter-marriages between different ethnic groups (Hoklo, Hakka and Pingpu Indigenous peoples). The third theme of my reach investigates the connection between languages and ethnicity. Apart from looking into the conditions of why native languages are vanishing in Taiwan, I examine if the language spoken at home has causal impact on one’s educational achievements and status attainment, therefore leading to inequality among different ethnic groups. In addition, I pay close attention to the substantiality of academic research. Therefore, at times I work outside the research framework when I feel my research has to respond to the major issues concerning national and social development. Courses Taught Undergraduate: Social Statistics, Social Survey and Research Methods, Social Network Analysis, R Programing for Data Analysis Master: Sociological Methodology, Historical Sociology, Spatial Analysis
