Dr. Yuchen Yang is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Birmingham. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, where he served as an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Sociology and was a residential/dissertation fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. His research and teaching interests broadly include gender and (a)sexuality, family and childhood, culture and semiotics, social category and language use, as well as social theory and qualitative methodology.
In his current research, Dr. Yang brings together theoretical insights from feminist sociology, linguistic anthropology, ethnomethodology, and critical childhood studies to examine how seemingly “natural” and “individual” attributes like gender and life stage emerge or dissipate through consumptive, discursive, and semiotic practices in childrearing and interview conversations. In the past, he has also studied cosplay participants’ collective embodiment of gender, asexual people’s experiences of high school sex talk, and Gramsci’s influence on Connell’s theorization of hegemonic masculinity.
Dr. Yang’s work has been published in Sociological Theory, Sexualities, and The Journal of Chinese Sociology, and received seven awards from six sections of the American Sociological Association (Theory, Sex & Gender, Sexualities, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Body and Embodiment, and History of Sociology and Social Thought). He is also a two-time winner of the Herbert Blumer Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Most recently, he won the Junior Theorist Award from the ASA Theory Section and the Richard Saller Prize for the Most Outstanding Dissertation in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.
He currently serves on the editorial boards of the new ASA journal, Sex & Sexualities, and the interdisciplinary journal, Men and Masculinities.
You may contact him via email at y.yang.17@bham.ac.uk.
Yuchen Yang, PhD 