David Su

David Su

Research Interests
Social Networks, Migration, Social Movements, Political Sociology, Economic Sociology

I am a political sociologist in training. Prior to coming to Berkeley, I held a Soc-demography Mphil from the University of Oxford (with distinction) and graduated (luckily survived) with a sociology degree from mainland China.
My main research interest is twofold. First, I applied survey and computational methods to study how individuals use social networks for gathering resources in non-routine contexts. Second, my research focuses on the dynamics of social movements and the underlying state-society relationship. Accordingly, I am currently pursuing the following research projects: (1) Social Network and the reproduction of health inequality: a UCNets-based study endeavors to explain why social networks generate undesirable health outcomes for immigrants but not for their US-born counterparts; (2) Dynamics of Contention: a mixed-method project drawing on archival sources and newspaper-based event history data to study why repressions quell social movements in some cases but backfire in others, a much-debated topic in political sociology and political science. As a graduate student instructor here, I am strongly interested in the aftermath of the 2022 UAW strike across the University of California system, still trying to figure out why I get lower pay (~2000 less/year) than promised.