Nga Than
PhD Student
Sociology Program
City University of New York - The Graduate Center

Nga Than is a Ph.D student in the Sociology program at City University of New York – The Graduate Center. Her research interests are in international migration, entrepreneurship, work & occupations, computational social science, consumption, and social media. As a mixed methods scholar, she has conducted qualitative research using interviewing, and participant observation, as well as employed methodological developments in machine learning to analyze text data, and administrative data. Her research has received support the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Taiwan's Huayu Enrichment Scholarship, CUNY - Doctoral Student Research Grant, and CUNY - Provost's Digital Innovation Grant.

[CV]     [CUNY Profile]     [Google Scholar]            

Research

  • Vietnamese Female Marriage Migrants in Taiwan: This research investigates the adaptation strategies of female marriage migrants, who marry Taiwanese men, and resettle in Taiwan. It asks the questions: what factors influence their adaptation? what are the obstacles? what helps them get integrated into the mainstream society?

  • Artisanal Food Entrepreneurs in New York's New Economy: Using the production of consumption approach, we examine how cultural products (in this case artisanal food items) are created, distributed, and advertised.

  • Content Creators: This research study examines the people, practices, and social relations that determine the success of content creation enterprises on Web 2.0 platforms. We are studying bloggers, podcasters, Instragrammers, YouTubers, and other content creators as media entrepreneurs in a new and growing part of the culture industry. We want to know how they get ideas, create content, connect with audiences, and sustain themselves as ongoing enterprises.

  • Platform-Mediated Work Management: This research examines online discourses generated by gig workers. We use computational social science techniques to analyze a large corpus of text data.

Selected Publications

  • 2020. "Visualizing the Urban." The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. [Link]

  • 2020. Algorithmic Boss in the New Economy. Review of Uberland by Alex Rosenblat. Sociological Forum. [Link]

  • 2020. Review of The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany , by C. Miller-Idriss. European Journal sof Cultural and Political Sociology. [Link]

  • 2019. Review of A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona, by E.Castañeda. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 44(2), 199-202. [Link]

Manuscripts in Progress

  • “Welcome to Gab!” (Article under Review, with Maria Rodriguez, Friederike Windel, and Diane Yoong)

  • “Investigating the impact of protective factors and alternative service outcomes in child welfare predictive analytics applications: A Random Forest Approach ” (Article, with Maria Rodriguez, Gleneara Bates, & Sebastian Hoyos-Torres)

  • “#WomensMarch: A Deep Neural Network Approach” (Article, with Maria Rodriguez, Heather Storer, Gleneara Bates, Friederike Windel, & Diane Yoong)

  • “Practical Guide for Teaching Sociology” (Article, with Karen Okigbo, Sebastian Villamizar Santamaria, Isabel Gil Everaert, & Anna Zhelnina )

  • “Social Infrastructure: The Role of NYCHA in New York's Artisanal Food Economy” (Article)

  • “Becoming “New Immigrants” - The Case of Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan.” (Article)

Teaching

Blog

I maintain a personal blog at Sociological Reasoning. Some of the selected posts can be found below: