Ruo-Fan Liu

EDUCATIONAL REPRODUCTION, CREDENTIALISM, AND YOUTH’S PATHWAYS

Across different streams of my research, I examine how students, families, educators, and institutions navigate uncertainty when the rules of the game change. Rather than treating merit, advantage, or credentials as stable resources, my work shows how they are made, interpreted, and contested in moments of transition. I am especially interested in how privileged and underprivileged groups respond when established pathways no longer guarantee predictable outcomes: when admissions criteria shift, when the rewards given to particular forms of cultural capital becomes less stable, when credentials lose their scarcity, and when new forms of evaluation redefine what counts as talent. I use multi-method approaches that follows 42 Taiwanese high school students in their critical moments to observe how the youth make life transitions.

Forthcoming, “Out of the Old, In with the New: Perceptions of Merit in Taiwan’s Holistic Admissions Reforms” (The Journal of Asian Studies)

2020 “Pathways to College Admissions: Student Strategies and Class Variations in Activating Cultural Knowledge in Taiwan.” International Studies in Sociology of Education, 31:3, 284-304. See [PDF]

2015 “Let the Timber Creek: An Alternative School’s Utopia for Coming Generations. New Taipei City, Taiwan: Acropolis.” See English Table of Content.

UNDER REVIEW

“A Paper on Digitalization of Credentials.” (Anonymized Title Under Review)

“A Paper on College Information and Students’ College Plans.” (Anonymized Title Under Review)

“Classed Signaling, Disciplinary Fit: Adaptive Cultural Capital and Students’ College Entry into Heterogeneous Fields.”(In Prep)