Dr. Ke-hsien Huang, 2013-2014

Ke-hsien Huang is now at the College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University.

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Ke-hsien Huang (PhD Sociology, North-Western University, 2013; BA and MA Sociology, National Taiwan University) was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. His dissertation, Cultural Intermediary and Globalization: Transforming Pentecostalism in Post-Mao China, is based on itinerant work and interviews conducted on the True Jesus Church—a long, widespread, and still vigorous yet understudied Pentecostal Church—in seventeen Chinese provinces. The findings demonstrate that this religion, which used to be stigmatized as superstitious, has been reformed as a more rationalized, more institutionalized, and less self-closed group. This 'civilizing' process is argued to be enacted, negotiated, and resisted through several encounters in the era of globalizing among different groups. Since coastal urban church elites are equipped with political opportunities, economic resources and cultural competence, with which they have been granted, they play a remarkable role in this process.

In addition to publishing his dissertational findings on issues such as changing church-state relationships in China, Confucian-style Pentecostalism, rural-migrant Christians’ solidarities and civil society, and Pentecostal transformations fuelled by inter-church dynamics, he pertained a project about Christian college students and Chinese secularism. Through ethnographical work on leisure time, aspirations for the future, and campus-fellowship participation of religious youth in coastal China, he examined how they craft, police, or negotiate their 'precarious' faith while mingling themselves among less religious or even secularist peers, teachers and parents and while being constantly challenged in a secularist and atheist educational system.

Huang’s research interests include the sociology of religion, global Pentecostalism, micro-sociology, qualitative methods, and Chinese Secularism.

Research projects:

• Chinese secularism, education, and urban aspiration among religious youth: an ethnographic study of Pentecostal college students in contemporary China (completed)
• Taming the Spirit by Using Indigenous Culture: An Ethnographic Study of the True Jesus Church as Confucian-Style Pentecostalism (completed)