Jenny Chan

Jenny Chan (PhD in Sociology, 2014) joined the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the University of Oxford in September 2014. Educated at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (BSSc in Sociology) and the University of Hong Kong (MPhil in Sociology), she was a Reid Research Scholar while pursuing a PhD at the University of London. In 2013-2014 she received the prestigious Great Britain-China Educational Award. Currently she serves as Board Member of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labor Movements, Editor of the Global Labour Journal, Contributing Editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal, and Editorial Board Member of the Springer Book Series of Work, Organization, and Employment.

Dr Chan's forthcoming book, entitled Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and a New Generation of Chinese Workers (co-authored with Pun Ngai and Mark Selden), is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. In 2015, she co-published a monograph with Yang and Xu Lizhi, La machine est ton seigneur et ton maître (The Machine is Your Lord and Your Master). Her recent articles have appeared in Current Sociology, Modern China, Critical Asian Studies, Asian Studies (Official Journal of the Asian Studies Association of Hong Kong), Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Globalizations, Human Relations, Global Labour Journal, The Asia-Pacific Journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Labor Notes, New Internationalist, New Technology, Work and Employment, and SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior).

Currently, Dr Chan is working on a research project about the informalisation of employment, the changing labour markets, and the emergence of student labour in China. Vocational school students do “internships” irrelevant to their educational goals and fields of study, subject to extension as production requires at short-staffed factories. Far from being freely chosen, the Chinese internship program is collectively organized on a mass scale, with industrial enterprises, local governments, and schools subverting the rights of student workers for the accumulation of profit.