Wang Zi

Wang Zi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of East Asian Studies (Duisburg-Essen) and co-investigator of a three-year research project on happiness, migration, and language. Fully funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this project examines effects of heritage cultural maintenance and migrants’ state of subjective wellbeing in Germany, with special emphasis on the Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish populations. Besides migration and happiness studies, his other research interests include education (particularly Japan and East Asia), ethnography, and the school-to-work transition of youths (East Asia-Europe comparative studies). Before coming to Sciences Po Paris, he has held visiting research fellowships/lectureships in other French institutions (EHESS Paris, Sciences Po Lille), in Italy (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), in Japan (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics Tokyo, Waseda University), and in Turkey (Altinbas University Istanbul). Wang Zi has degrees from the universities of Waseda in Japan (BA), Sciences Po Paris in France (MA), and Duisburg-Essen in Germany (Dr. phil, summa cum laude).

Latest publications

The Discursive Construction of Hierarchy in Japanese Society: An Ethnographic Study of Secondary School Clubs (monograph, De Gruyter, forthcoming)

Language and Social Relations (book chapter, in Heinrich, P and Ohara, Y Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics, Routledge, 2019)

Research interests 

Comparative education (East Asia and Europe), critical discourse analysis, ethnographic methods in area studies, happiness, migration, sociology of language, youth studies

Research project pursued at the CEE

Supplementary case studies of his on-going research project.

To know more

• e-mail: wz1205@gmail.com 
• Link to personal webpage
• University Profile Website