Pamela P. Tsui

My research examines how people pursue commitments, aspirations, and desires when political and social conditions make them increasingly difficult to sustain. At a time of democratic erosion, political repression, and persistent heteronormative expectations, I ask how social actors continue to act on their commitments that are suppressed and intimate desires that are stigmatized or rendered illegitimate. Across my work on social movements, civil society, markets, gender, and sexuality, I study how people and organizations navigate these constraints without simply complying with or resisting them. This research program has produced publications in American Sociological Review,  Gender & Society, Sexualities, Law & Society Review, and Critical Asia Archives, as well as paper awards from the American Sociological Association and the Hong Kong Sociological Association. 

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My dissertation draws on eventful temporality and relational economic sociology to theorize how movement repression reshapes social life over time. Based on fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada, it traces the transnational afterlife of Hong Kong’s 2019 protests by examining how supporters reimagine and repurpose money across changing political conditions.

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Before starting graduate school, I worked as a writer, performer, and coordinator in an experimental theatre company. I am also a hobbyist photographer. All the photos on this site are my own.