Angie Y. Chung

Expertise: Urban Sociology

New Immigrant Growth Machines: The Politics of Redevelopment in Koreatown and Monterey Park Funded by the National Science Foundation, the project explores how immigrants have politically negotiated the entrepreneurial growth of two globalizing ethnic economies in Koreatown and Monterey Park, Los Angeles.  Our general aim is to  understand how immigrant leaders (e.g. entrepreneurs, land developers, global investors, and economic development organizations) have worked to promote their economic growth agenda in the local governments and civic institutions of the LA metropolitan region amidst suburbanization, political barriers, and economic recessions.  We ask how their development strategies are shaped by the local political, spatial, and demographic context of the ethnic economy and compare how their impact is being felt across different ethnic enclaves.

“Globalizing” Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy: A Case Study on South Korea and Mainland China.  The project examines how the social, national and historical contexts of global education in different East Asian countries have informed student understandings of international education and affected the academic and social preparedness of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese international students at a public university in upstate New York.  I am also interested in exploring how the so-called "globalization" of higher education in Seoul, South Korea restructures power dynamics in the educational system of rapidly modernizing nations like Korea.  The general objective of this study is first to determine how these concurrent reforms have restructured classroom dynamics and the broader university power structure through new hierarchies based on "English language capital."

Beyond the Algorithm: Exploring the Social Impact of AI and Technology: 

The rise of open-source AI and other technology has opened the doors to unlimited tools and opportunities that can be used to advance social good and change but also, raises major social, safety, and ethical issues, such as political misinformation and deep fakes, data privacy and security, bias and discrimination in algorithms, mental health and social behavioral issues, unequal technological access, and widening social inequalities. I believe that sociology and other social sciences need to be on the forefront of this national discussion as it evolves but like other policymakers have been trying to keep up with the rapidly-changing technology, its uses, and its implications. I am currently training student-led research teams, webinar panels, and broader projects on different aspects of AI from a social perspective and leading a Research Team on Trustworthy, Transparent, and Ethical AI Systems for the AI+ Institute.

Research Interests