Zheng Fu
Research Agenda
My work develops across three connected areas: the social life of AI, the production of the information crisis, and legitimacy as a cultural and political process.
* = co-first authorship. + = first authorship.
What is legible to AI, how sociopolitical context shapes the perception of AI, and the uneven adoption of AI.
This project examines how different forms of capital are legible to AI differently and how this in turn, shapes the perception of AI.
This project studies how people evaluate government decisions mediated by algorithms, with particular attention to how authoritarian contexts influence these evaluations.
This project investigates how AI non-use might lead to a different kind of digital divide, one where non-use is not only driven by lack of access but also expressed as active resistance.
We study how universities frame AI literacy and future AI citizenship, with a focus on how differen institutions imagine different AI futures for their students.
Research on how media institutions, fact-checking practices, and historical narratives shape the meaning of the information crisis.
Using computational text analysis, this project traces how U.S. mainstream media have framed the information crisis and shows how contemporary narratives draw on longer twentieth-century histories.
This project problematizes the boundary between “fact” and “misinformation,” showing how professional and crowd-sourced fact-checking systems surface different kinds of claims and publics.
Projects on institutional legitimacy, migrant labor politics, and the social forces that shape cultural and political judgments.
This paper investigates how legitimacy is built through expertise at the boundary of the state, law, and business interests.
Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and labor activist records, this article shows how fewer local ties can reduce exposure to soft repression and unexpectedly facilitate collective resistance.
This article develops a sociological theory of legitimacy as work performed by networks of actors who make legal and regulatory commands defensible in practice.
This article shows how geopolitical rivalry shapes anti-immigrant preferences and can outweigh racial or cultural similarity in public evaluations of migrants.
We compare how mainstream media mobilized past disease experiences across different sociopolitical settings, showing that the cultural meaning of crisis is produced through competing networks of expertise and allies, formed in distinct sociopolitical contexts.