What does it take to get ahead when college admission rules change? Who has the resources to anticipate risks and adapt, and who is left responding after opportunities have already slipped away?

These questions lie at the heart of Ruo-Fan Liu’s research. As APARC's Taiwan Program postdoctoral fellow 2024-2026 – the first scholar to serve in this role since the program’s launch two years ago – Liu examines how young people navigate educational transitions in Taiwan's college admissions landscape, which has shifted from an exam-centered system to holistic screening in recruiting elites. Her work shows that inequality is not simply a matter of who succeeds or fails, but of who can mobilize support early enough to stay ahead of unexpected challenges.

We spoke with Liu about her work and fellowship experience at APARC. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Get APARC fellowship announcements and scholars' insights delivered to your inbox >

Could you describe your research briefly?

My dissertation examines how young people navigate contingency in college admissions: what kinds of support they seek, how they mobilize resources, and how these processes shape postsecondary transitions. I situate this puzzle in Taiwan, where the state has implemented admissions reforms intended to level the playing field, including holistic admissions, school-based nominations, and test-optional and dossier-based application routes. Although these reforms open new opportunities, they also introduce different forms of uncertainty into students' college pathways.

As a sociologist, I care deeply about how people exercise agency under different forms of constraint and opportunity. In asking why class reproduction persists amid contingency and uncertainty, I find that middle-class students preserve class privilege not because they avoid setbacks or always get what they want, but because they anticipate risks early and coordinate familial and school support before risks become failures. I call this process “anticipatory coordination.” By contrast, working-class students are more often reactive mobilizers, seeking help after problems have already crystallized into adverse outcomes. This temporal dimension – who can act early enough to get ahead – shapes who can get around unexpected hurdles.

I use a wide range of methods, but ethnography remains my favorite method. Talking with people, reading social cues, and capturing unspoken assumptions are the moments I have found most meaningful in the research process.

What challenges have you encountered in researching this topic?

One of the major challenges I have encountered is the scarcity of Taiwan-based cases published in general sociology journals. Sociology remains highly U.S.-centered and theoretically demanding, which makes publication difficult, especially during peer review.

As a Taiwan-focused researcher, I am still learning how to make the case for the broader significance of this work in different publication outlets: how to frame Taiwan’s relevance, address concerns about generalizability, and explain empirical evidence in depth without creating unnecessary confusion.

That is why I cherish APARC and FSI as my institutional home at Stanford, where faculty members and mentors value international work and underrepresented cases and support researchers throughout the process.

Tell us about your work at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL).
 
At SNAPL, I co-led a project with Professor Gi-Wook Shin that examines how migrant scholars and transnational elites institutionalize cross-border exchange, negotiate with state officials and other key brokers, and produce knowledge across multiple languages.

Since 2024, our team has collected network, interview, archival, and organizational data, working with two postdoctoral fellows and two research assistants. The project has generated several papers in progress. In the first paper, we find that migrant scholars play crucial intermediary roles in facilitating cross-border exchange, a mechanism we call the “transnational pipeline,” which extends beyond individuals’ sporadic efforts. In the second paper, we turn our teamwork into a methodological technique for studying transnational elites.

We are currently comparing Taiwan’s and Korea’s funding infrastructures and developing a comparative model that contrasts “state sponsorship” and “state capitalism” to explain how states extend their power beyond national borders.

How has your time at APARC supported your research and professional development?

Stanford has helped me become a more collaborative scholar.

My first cultural shock was Stanford’s lab culture, where scholars often do not work alone but make decisions together as a team. I also learned how closely people back each other up. In many moments when I needed help or had to step away from a project briefly, someone was there to take over and support the work.

I learned from this culture and have applied it to my own team-leading skills in other collaborative projects. I learned how to divide labor across different team compositions, recognize collaborators’ strengths and weaknesses as scholars, support a team, secure funding for future research, and resolve tensions across different writing styles.

What advice would you give to prospective APARC postdoctoral scholars?
 
Many young scholars spend a lot of time chasing trends. The current job market exacerbates this dynamic, because there are fewer available positions. Trendy research can be valuable, but it may become outdated by the time scholars enter the job market.

I am not saying we should ignore research trends. Rather, I believe an academic journey should be your own path: developing the skills you want to invest in, cultivating the networks you are part of, and taking time to work through the puzzle you cannot let go of. In short, take your time to develop your expertise, fields, and intellectual craft.

At the same time, be strategic about your time as you approach graduation. Manage reviewing commitments, submission timelines, writing schedules, and publication timing carefully so that you have more tools when you begin a faculty position. And enjoy this transition, because once you are on the tenure track, the clock starts ticking again, and you may no longer have the same freedom you had as a doctoral candidate.

To put it simply: take your time during graduate training, be a strategic planner about timing when you are on the market, and protect your time once you become a junior faculty member.

What’s next for you?
 
I will join National Chengchi University, a leading research-intensive university in Taipei, Taiwan, as an assistant professor of sociology.

I will continue collaborating with APARC and SNAPL at Stanford while also bringing my three international research collaborations to NCCU: First-Generation Students in the United States, Organizational Change and College Admissions Under Changing Ranking Systems, and Stanford’s Transnational Project. I hope to involve my future students in these projects so that they can gain valuable experience in collaborative research.

I am excited to apply for my own grants, teach courses in the sociology of education, and cultivate a new generation of Taiwanese scholars. Please stay tuned to my personal website, and feel free to reach out if you are interested in any of these research themes.

South Korea's stock market has been the world's hottest over the past year, with the Kospi Index surging 165% on the back of the country’s two semiconductor powerhouses, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. This new territory "is creating a lot of issues within Korea," Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, director of APARC's Korea Program, tells Barron's.

The magazine's story – South Korea Has a Chip Conundrum – Huge Profits and a Serious Selloff – highlights how the two companies' mind-boggling earnings and bonuses have opened something of a Pandora’s box of social and economic friction. For example, disgruntled employees at less-privileged Samsung divisions are leaving their union and trying to form a new one, Shin says.

The story notes, however, that these controversies "might look like a mild kerfuffle if the chip makers’ shares keep falling back to earth." Despite a 150% year-to-date gain, Samsung shares dropped 16% last week amid foreign investor sales and leveraged local buying.

What can the history of Islamic Singapore teach us about one of the most important eras of Indian Ocean connectivity? And what do Islamic traditions in Southeast Asia reveal about everyday ethics for living responsibly on a damaged planet and navigating our relationship with the more-than-human world?

These are some of the questions Teren Sevea, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, explores in his research. Sevea recently completed his residency as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC. A scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, he investigates the region’s distinctive Islamic practices and intellectual traditions, revealing both its centrality to the study of Islam and the reasons it has often been marginalized within the field, despite its vast Muslim populations.

We spoke with Sevea about his work and fellowship experience at APARC. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Get APARC fellowship announcements and scholars' insights delivered to your inbox >

Could you describe your research briefly?

Very briefly, I’m close to finishing a monograph on Islamic Singapore and the Sufi networks that connected this port city to Muslim and non-Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world, from its revival as a British port right up to the present. At the same time, I’m developing a second project on land, extraction, and natural resources, where I look at how multispecies religious worlds – which include animals, trees, waters, and spirits – offer different ways of thinking about ethics, vulnerability, and what it means to live through times of climate crisis.

What initially drew you to these topics, and how did you develop your methods?

I’m trained in history and anthropology, and these projects really emerged from a worry that the histories I was reading – and sometimes writing – were too narrow. By focusing on certain texts, elites, and official archives, these histories risked overlooking the working-class believers, community‑based scholars, and the graves, ruins, trees, animals, and waters that sustain devotional life. So my methods have become necessarily interdisciplinary and site‑centered. I read multilingual texts and study official documents and elites, but also sit at shrines, in cemeteries, on coastal edges, and in plantations, listening to oral traditions, dreams, and visions, and paying close attention to the research practices of community‑based scholars and caretakers of the landscapes I study.

In my project on multispecies religious worlds, I’ve tried to extend this approach to track how communities’ accounts of charismatic animals, trees, groves, rocks, and islands help us think about ecological responsibility in an age of rapid development, industrial expansion, climate catastrophe, and faith in technological “fixes.” This has pushed me to learn from interviews, environmental histories, flood narratives, and what I have called interspecies communities.

What challenges have you encountered in studying this topic?

One of the challenges is that the histories I study are often deliberately forgotten or actively erased. Graves are relocated or demolished, ruins are converted into “useful” secular spaces, interspecies communities are displaced by development, and the archives of working‑class believers and community‑based scholars are fragile and dispersed. In certain Southeast Asian settings, the practices and sites I study have also been treated as superstitious or as “not really Islam,” which shapes how they are documented – or not documented – both bureaucratically and academically.

Another challenge is a methodological one. Much of my work relies on community‑based scholarship, popular histories, oral traditions, dreams, visions, and other stories that are supposedly not easily translatable into standard scholarly categories. The question for me, though, has not been whether to “believe” them or not, but how to learn from them. How do we, for instance, write histories that take seriously trees that bleed and overturn bulldozers, or animal saints and ancestors who enforce ethical codes, without reducing them to fantastical allegory on the one hand or romanticizing them on the other?

Finally, there is the challenge of working across scales. I am always moving between very local sites across Southeast Asia – graveyards, mangrove forests, crocodile ponds, palm oil estates – and global processes: colonial hunting regimes, plantation capitalism, petrochemical infrastructures, climate departure, and technocratic fantasies of overcoming the climate crisis. Holding these together, while remaining grounded in the voices of community‑based scholars, caretakers of these sites, and devotional communities, is demanding but, I think, necessary.

How has your time at APARC supported your research?

My fellowship at APARC has really allowed me to place Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia much more firmly within broader conversations on Asia and the Pacific. It has given me the time and space to finish my monograph on Islamic Singapore, while also thinking seriously about how questions of land, extraction, and resource futures in Southeast Asia resonate with debates across the region. Practically, APARC has given me access to an extraordinary community of scholars working on politics, economics, demography, human rights, political and comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, and political economy, as well as climate, energy, migration, and religion.

Conversations here have sharpened my thinking about technofixes and “green developmentalism” – from Singapore’s petrochemical complexes and reclaimed islands to the shifting of Indonesia’s capital to East Kalimantan – and about how to foreground vulnerability and multispecies responsibility in these discussions. It has also pushed me to reframe my materials for different audiences: not only historians of Islam or Southeast Asia, but scholars of climate, religion, environment, and contemporary Asia more broadly, who are grappling with similar questions from very different sites and through very different approaches.

Discussions with APARC colleagues I have learned from have moved across so many themes: the ethics of representing vulnerable communities in climate research, the politics of palm oil and coal, how to think about interspecies responsibility alongside state-led sustainability agendas, but also migration and development, transnationalism and diaspora, labor and governance, care work and health, children and youth, legacies of the 1947 Partition of South Asia, Singapore’s governance, the state of higher education and its pressures, and the precarious lives of migrant and transient workers in Southeast Asia. We also talked a lot about the Bay Area itself as a site in its own right.

Many of these exchanges have unfolded in multilingual conversations that drift very naturally between scholarship and everyday life. That has reminded me how tightly intellectual and everyday life are braided together. It has been a real privilege to be in a community where so many people are thinking about overlapping questions of environment, religion, political economy, migration, and social change in Asia, and to learn from students who bring their own experiences – from Jakarta’s and Karachi’s floods to Singapore’s “garden city” – into the room. In many ways, being here has felt like a truly Asian experience, but one unfolding in the Bay Area.

Have you discovered anything surprising while you were here?

What has surprised me most is how deeply these seemingly “local” stories I work with – about environments in maritime Southeast Asia – have resonated with scholars here who focus on very different places and issues. Colleagues and students have generously responded by sharing their own “tree stories,” “animal stories,” flood memories, or accounts of sacred animals and groves from other parts of Asia and beyond.

I have also been struck by how quickly conversations here turn to technofixes: mechanical trees, negative‑emissions technologies, desalination plants, and “smart” eco‑cities. Encountering these discussions up close, within a community that is rigorously engaged with policy and practice, has sharpened my sense that there is a real need to tell other kinds of stories: stories that foreground vulnerability as situated and context-specific, that ask whose futures are being secured or sacrificed, and that insist on multispecies response‑ability rather than relying only on technological rescue. Those exchanges have been some of the most intellectually and personally rewarding moments of my time at APARC and Stanford.

Living in the Bay Area has also opened up new dimensions of my research. It has enriched my work on anti-colonial, revolutionary, left‑wing connections between Singapore, Java, Burma, and the Bay Area itself. I had not expected, before coming here, to be pursuing research at religious sites in the Bay Area as part of this project. 

What is your advice to young scholars in your field?

I doubt I am one to offer advice – I am mostly in the business of receiving it. But if pressed, I might say a few things.

Firstly, try to listen very carefully to the people and places you work with, including the non-human ones. Let scholars from the communities you study, their caretakers, storytellers, animals, trees, and waters unsettle your concepts and teach you more than you expected to learn. For those working on religion and ecology, it helps to be suspicious of ready‑made binaries – monotheism versus “animism” or “nature worship,” religion versus environment, indigenous versus cosmopolitan – that flatten lifeworlds grounded in multispecies relatedness and kinship.

Secondly, consider taking communities’ histories, oral traditions, dreams, and visions seriously as forms of knowledge and research practice, even when they do not sit easily within disciplinary expectations. At the same time, be reflexive about your own position, your archives, and your responsibilities to the communities you write about, and be rigorous about how you document, interpret, and present those materials.

Thirdly – and this I can say with a bit more certainty – do not be afraid of interdisciplinarity. To understand Islamic Singapore, charismatic animals, or climate vulnerability in Jakarta and Karachi, I have needed history, anthropology, religious studies, environmental humanities, and sometimes hydrology, forestry, and energy politics. Let the questions you ask guide you across disciplinary lines, and be willing to speak to area studies and to broader debates on politics, environment, and society in Asia and beyond.

The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS), the flagship peer-reviewed publication in the field of Korean studies, returns to Stanford University’s Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) with the publication of Volume 31, Issue 1. JKS publishes a broad range of original scholarly articles related to Korean history, culture, politics, and society. The journal also publishes reviews of new Korea-related books, making it both a venue for original research and a guide to the field’s expanding literature. Its contributors and readership span disciplines and continents, bringing together historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists representing the wide range of disciplinary approaches in Korean studies.

The journal’s institutional history traces the arc of Korean studies in the United States. The journal was originally established in 1969 at the University of Washington in Seattle, the early center of gravity for Korean studies in America. After the publication of two standalone volumes (1969, 1971), James Palais, an influential historian of premodern Korea, shaped the journal's intellectual character through serial publication (1979-1987). Michael Robinson, at Indiana University-Bloomington, carried the journal forward as editor (1988-1992) before a long publication hiatus. In 2004, JKS was revived at Stanford University by co-editors Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Korea Program at APARC, and John Duncan, professor of Korean history at UCLA and former director of its Center for Korean Studies. It was housed at Stanford until 2008. The journal has since been guided by editorial leadership at the University of Washington (Clark Sorensen), Columbia University (Theodore Hughes), and The George Washington University (Jisoo Kim). JKS returns to Stanford under the new editorial team of Paul Chang (Shorenstein APARC), Yumi Moon (Department of History), and Dafna Zur (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures).

JKS welcomes manuscripts from researchers at all career stages, working across the full range of topics, periods, and methodologies reflected in the field of Korean studies. Korean studies is undergoing genuine growth with new generations of scholars producing compelling work that is reshaping our understanding of Korea’s past and present. The Journal of Korean Studies exists to support and disseminate that work.

Kerstin Norris is a research associate at APARC’s Korea Program and managerial editor of The Journal of Korean Studies.