Ruo-Fan Liu

See my CV here:

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Starting from July 2024, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. My research examines the types of uncertainties students encountered after Taiwan’s holistic admission reforms, and how parents and teachers activate cultural and social capital to regain admissions advantages. My work has appeared in International Studies in Sociology of Education and Ethnography. I am a Fulbright recipient, a former Congress party negotiator, and an author of Let the Timber Creek, which is selected as the top tenth best non-fictional book by China Times.    

My other line of research focuses on meritocracy and credentialism in East Asia. My award-winning paper, Digital Credentialism, reveals how symbolic power of credentials travels through online platforms to reify people’s beliefs about who is qualified, legitimated, and trustworthy. My invited paper, Out of Old, In with New, explores how Taiwanese students and teachers constantly juggle between old merit, measured by standardized test scores, and new merit, measured by non-test performance, to redefine who is more talented and superior.

I write books and articles. As a methodological pluralist, I continuously explore how researchers analyze qualitative and quantitative data to arrive at novel answers. At Stanford, I will turn my dissertation, Sticky or Shaken, into a book manuscript. I will also expand my current research agenda on uncertainty and legitimacy into organizational hiring and talent flows. You can contact me via mikki.liu@wisc.edu. Follow my Twitter handle for further updates. My google scholar and ORCID offer updates on my work.