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Ming-Cheng Lo
 

Ming-Cheng Lo

Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Curriculum Vitae

Office: 2269 SS&H
Office hours: On leave during spring 2013

Phone: Please contact me by email
E-mail: mmlo@ucdavis.edu

Research Interests

  • Civil society and social movements
  • Health and illness experiences
  • Sociology of culture
  • Comparative-historical sociology

Current Research Projects

  • “Immigrant Patients and Culturally Competent Healthcare”: Drawing on in-depth interviews with policy makers, primary care physicians, and Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants in California, I examine how policy makers and healthcare professionals develop notions of “culturally competent healthcare.” The study further analyzes how the state’s and professions’ categories of cultural competence are operationalized and transformed by front-line healthcare professionals. In addition, I trace how immigrant patients make sense of clinical encounters and develop their own coping mechanisms. At a theoretical level, the project addresses two broad issues. It offers an understanding of the everyday “medical consciousness” of ordinary people. The project also contributes to understandings of “immigrant habitus.” (Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the ASA/NSF Advancement of the Discipline Grant.)
  • “Cultures of Civil Society”: This study focuses on how political cultures develop in two marginalized, newly democratized societies in East Asia: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Based on a dataset of 376 political cartoons that my co-authors and I collected, this project has generated several articles. Beyond reporting empirical findings about these two places, this project engages with the theoretical literature on the paths of young, non-Western civil societies.
  • "Contending Visions for Post-Disaster Reconstruction": My co-author and I are starting a new project on how and why NGOs and local ethnic minorities developed competing and sometimes contradictory visions for community rebuilding in Taiwan in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot. We are currently conducting in-depth interviews and researching government archives. (Funded by the CCK Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.)
  • “Handbook of Cultural Sociology”: I recently co-edited The Handbook of Cultural Sociology (with John R. Hall and Laura Grindstaff; Routledge 2010). The Handbook contains 65 chapters that address various topics on the cultures in and of the transnational lifeworlds.

Selected Publications