Congratulations to Jun Zhou, 2023 SWS Cheryl Allyn Miller Award Winner!
Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) established The Cheryl Allyn Miller Award for graduate students and recent PhDs. working in the area of women and paid work: employment and self-employment, informal market work, illegal work. The award honors the late Cheryl Allyn Miller, a sociologist and feminist who studied women and paid work. The 2023 Cheryl Allyn Miller Award Winner is Jun Zhou.
Thank you to the Cheryl Allyn Miller Award Subcommittee that included Laura Bunyan (Chair), Suki Xiao, Rianka Roy, Sarah A. Robert, and Lisa Dilks.
Jun Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, a student affiliate with the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, and a certificate holder in the Science, Technology & Society Program. Her research interests intersect gender/sexuality, political economy, and science and technology studies.
Jun’s dissertation project is a comparative study of gender in the political economy by tracing the varying human-machine relations across China’s manufacturing and digital labor regimes. Specifically, drawing on ethnographic and historical methods, this project looks at how digital technologies such as algorithms reconfigure human-machine relations in digital workplaces compared to those in the pre-digital age. Juxtaposing the panopticon-style machinery on assembly lines that restrict women’s body in time and space and present-day technologies of tracking, surveilling, and valuing on digital platforms, the project attends to both the continuities and ruptures of (apparently) new digital machinery with antecedent forms of capital accumulation and state control.
Jun’s article looks at how women negotiate work-family relations when the family is internal to their work and how much autonomy women can attain during this process. Drawing on ethnographic data in Chicago’s Chinatown and in-depth interviews with immigrant women entrepreneurs, the article examines how women construct the boundary between “family” and “business” even though the business-making practices in the market are undergirded by the thick gendered kinship relations grounded in the family. The article offers implications of their entangled work-family experiences on the implicit power relations and inequalities in the increasingly informal and irregular workplace against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and mass unemployment.
Jun is the recipient of the ASA Economic Sociology section 2022 Best Student Paper in Economic Sociology and Entrepreneurship Award, the ASA Family Section 2022 Linda Burton Award, the 2022 McGuigan Prize for Best Graduate Essay in Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Michigan, and the 2020 Raymond Fogelson Award for Best Master Thesis in the Ethnological and Historical Sciences at University of Chicago.
We hope you will join us in congratulating Jun Zhou, and that you will make plans to join us for the 2023 Winter Meeting Awards Banquet and Reception to be held on Saturday, January 14 starting at 5:15 pm. Please register here for the 2023 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.
For more information on The Cheryl Allyn Miller Award, please visit: socwomen.org/awards/cherylallynmilleraward/.