Dissertation Project
Temporal Meaning of Money
My dissertation examines how political ruptures reorganize the meanings and uses of money over time. Focusing on Hong Kong and its diaspora after the 2019 protests, I trace how money becomes a symbolic, emotional, and relational medium through which people reorganize solidarity, belonging, and collective action across borders and over time. Drawing on extensive interviews, ethnographic observation, and digital content analysis in Hong Kong and Canada, the project brings eventful temporality into conversation with relational economic sociology to theorize how major contentious events reshape economic life and how money helps carry political projects across temporal and geographic discontinuities.
American Sociological Review
Pamela P. Tsui
Social movement studies have long centered social movement organizations, but increasingly decentralized and digitally mediated contention challenges organization-centered and event-centered accounts of how movements persist and transform. Drawing on resource mobilization theory and economic sociology, I develop a relational resource mobilization framework and a model of connective resource mobilization to explain how movements generate strategic capacity and continuity across organizational configurations, phases of contention, and borders, using the Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement as a case for theorizing broader patterns of movement adaptation under changing political and socio-technological conditions.
