For decades, success in Taiwan's educational system followed a clear path: study hard, ace the test, and secure admission offers. But what happens when the cultural rules that once guaranteed success suddenly shift? In Taiwan, a major reform has transformed university admissions—from a rigid exam-based system to a more Americanized, holistic approach. This shift disrupted long-standing pathways of advantage, leaving students and families unsure of which achievements and traits would now “count.”

In this talk, Dr.Liu examines how teachers develop a new form of cultural labor, referred to as bridgework: speculating about what gatekeepers desire and helping students attune their applications to meet those expectations. Bridgework entails three distinct logics: selling class, selling disadvantage, and selling potential. Selling class transforms middle-class students’ privilege into disciplinary signals. Selling disadvantage emphasizes working-class and minority’s adversity backgrounds while concealing their styles of representation. Selling potential repackages underprepared students’ modest and irrelevant past experiences as indicators of future promise. By unveiling how culture gains its contingent value in an uncertain field, this talk extends Bourdieu's theory and sheds new light on the fields of education, culture, and stratification.

Speaker:

Ruo-Fan Liu is the inaugural Taiwan Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). She earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores how Taiwan's holistic admission reforms created uncertainties for students and how parents and teachers leveraged cultural and social capital to restore admissions advantages.

A Fulbright recipient and former Congress party negotiator, Ruo-Fan is also the author of Let the Timber Creek: An Alternative School’s Utopia for Coming Generations, recognized as one of the top ten non-fiction books by China Times. Her work has been published in International Studies in Sociology of Education and Ethnography, and she also investigates transformative meritocracy and credentialism in East Asia.

At APARC, Ruo-Fan is transforming her dissertation, When Ladders Move, into a book manuscript, while expanding her research on uncertainty and legitimacy to offer practical recommendations for different nations’ policies and talent flows.