Angie Y. Chung

Expertise: Urban Sociology

Recent Research Projects

• The Impact of COVID-19 on Racial Belonging and Well-Being Among Asian/American Students in New York State Amid heightened fears over the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals of East Asian descent have been racially profiled and collectively targeted as the 'carriers of disease' in public discourse and encounters--invoking deeply ingrained stereotypes about race, citizenship, and nationality. The study takes a place-based approach to examine to what extent East Asian international students and East Asian American students report similar treatment as racialized foreigners in different urban campus settings and if this is prompting them to strategically readapt their ethnic and/or national identities around new boundaries of belonging. The multi-disciplinary teams will employ a mixed-methods, multi-level place-based approach to understand the adaptation and psychological well-being of Asian/ American students in high-immigration and low-immigration campuses in New York State. The methods will include: 1) content analysis of U.S. and Asian newspapers; 2) interviews with East Asian/ American (EAA) undergraduates; 3) and campus-wide student surveys.

• New Immigrant Growth Machines: The Politics of Redevelopment in Koreatown and Monterey Park Funded by the National Science Foundation, the project explores how immigrants have politically negotiated the entrepreneurial growth of two globalizing ethnic economies in Koreatown and Monterey Park, Los Angeles.  Our general aim is to  understand how immigrant leaders (e.g. entrepreneurs, land developers, global investors, and economic development organizations) have worked to promote their economic growth agenda in the local governments and civic institutions of the LA metropolitan region amidst suburbanization, political barriers, and economic recessions.  We ask how their development strategies are shaped by the local political, spatial, and demographic context of the ethnic economy and compare how their impact is being felt across different ethnic enclaves.

• “Globalizing” Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy: A Case Study on South Korea and Mainland China.  The project examines how the social, national and historical contexts of global education in different East Asian countries have informed student understandings of international education and affected the academic and social preparedness of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese international students at a public university in upstate New York.  I am also interested in exploring how the so-called "globalization" of higher education in Seoul, South Korea restructures power dynamics in the educational system of rapidly modernizing nations like Korea.  The general objective of this study is first to determine how these concurrent reforms have restructured classroom dynamics and the broader university power structure through new hierarchies based on "English language capital."

• Saving Face:  The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth.  I am currently speaking on themes from my book on the dynamics of emotion work among the adult-age children of Korean and Chinese immigrant families.  Responding to stereotypical myths about Asian immigrant families, the book takes a closer look at how the second generation children negotiate the emotional context surrounding their different social roles within the family and how this frames their approach to ethnicity as they enter adulthood.  The book explores how emotions are managed and expressed around family roles, the way they are conveyed across generational and cultural differences, and how they shape the educational aspirations and ethnic worldviews of the second generation amidst the various tensions, complexities and ambiguities of being Asian American. 

Research Interests

• Urban Sociology and Community Studies
• Race and Ethnicity
• Immigration
• Gender and Family
• Asian American Studies
• Ethnography and Qualitative Methods
• Globalization of Higher Education