Dr. Kennedy Chi-Pan Wong

Biography

Dr. Kennedy Chi-pan Wong is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The King’s University. As a political and cultural sociologist, his research investigates how political fault lines and transnational repression shape the formation—and fragmentation—of alliances in the context of global migration and diaspora organizing. Conceptually, he is interested in how different senses of “we” emerge in response to overlapping crises and how these shifting formations influence democratic, ethnic, and diasporic political action.

Dr. Wong’s current book project, Multipolar Politics: Challenges of Global Alliance-Building Against Authoritarianism, is based on five years of comparative ethnographic research with Hong Konger diaspora activists and their allies in the United States, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. His work has received national and international recognition, including the First Place Award from Alpha Kappa Delta, Honorable Mention from the ASA Human Rights Section, and the Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award from the Pacific Sociological Association. It has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (declined due to graduation).

Research Interests

• Political Sociology
• Social Movements, Solidarity, and Polarizations
• Race and Ethnic Relations
• Diaspora, Migration and Globalization
• Cultural Sociology and Social Theory

Selected Honours, Grants, and Awards

2025 Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association (ASA) Human Rights Section Graduate Student Paper Award, United States.

2025 First Place Winner, Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD) Graduate Student Paper Award, United States.

2025 ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DDRIG), American Sociological Association, the United States. (USD 16,000; Declined due to graduation)

2024 Young Scholar in Social Movements, Center for the Study of Social Movements, University of Notre Dame, the United States.

2023 Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award, Pacific Sociological Association, the United States.

2023 The SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. (CAD 20,000)

Current Projects

• Multipolar Politics: Challenges of Global Alliance-Building Against Authoritarianism
• Immigrant and Refugee Regimes: Cross-National Cases of Post-2019 Hong Kong Exiles
• Relational Forms of Transnational Repression

Selected Publications

Wong, Kennedy Chi-Pan. 2024. “Sowing Hate, Cultivating Loyalists: Mobilizing Repressive Nationalist Diasporas for Transnational Repression by the People’s Republic of China Regime.” American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642241267931

Wong, Kennedy Chi-Pan & Miu Chung Yan. 2022. “Leaving the Homeland Again for My Family’s Future: Post-Return Migration Among Hong Kong Canadians.” Journal of International Migration and Integration. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00955-0

Wong, Kennedy Chi-Pan. 2021. “From Helmets to Face Masks: How Collective Emotions Sustain Diaspora Mobilization from Homeland Uprising to Global Pandemic among the Hong Kongers.” Social Transformations in Chinese Societies 17(2):117–26. https://doi.org/10.1108/STICS-10-2020-0028

Shin, Leo K., Kennedy Chi-pan Wong, Ryan Sun, Justin Cheng, Elliott Cheung, and Michelle To. 2020 “After the Protest: A Vancouver Archive of the Umbrella Movement.” The University of British Columbia Hong Kong Studies Initiative. https://hksi.ubc.ca/after-the-protest/home/

Wong, Kennedy Chi-Pan & Aqua Tsang. 2014. The Invisible Citizens: Urban Life of the Homeless (看不見的城市人: 無家者的城市生活). Hong Kong: Hypermedia Press.

Forthcoming Publications

Wong, Kennedy Chi-Pan. “Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests in 2019.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Sinophone Culture.

Wong, Kennedy Chi-Pan, Nathan Long-tin Tsang, and Justin Chun-yin Cheng. “Hong Kong Beyond Hong Kong? Diasporization and its Multi-linkages to Places.” In Handbook of Hong Kong Studies, Brill.

Selected Presentations

“Sharing Milktea, Dividing ‘Asians’? Conceptualizing Position-map Using the Case of #MilkTeaAlliance in the US and Japan.” American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, 2025.

“Pro-Democracy Yet Conservative? Exploring the Convergence of Political Alignments Among Hong Kong Diaspora.” ASA Annual Meeting, 2025.

“Outward, Inward, and Homeward: The Multi-relational Approach to Diaspora Politics.” ISA Annual Convention, San Francisco, 2024.

“Searching for a Home, Becoming Citizen: Transforming Diasporic Commitments into Domestic Civic Actions in the Case of Hong Kongers.” Metropolis Identities Summit, Vancouver, 2024.

“Sowing Hate, Cultivating Loyalists: Mobilizing Repressive Nationalist Diasporas.” Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, 2023.