Faculty and Staff Research Series Presents a Research in Progress Talk with Wenqi Yang

Research in Progress Talk: ”Coercion in Mediation” by Wenqi Yang (Sociology and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov. 7, at 4:15 p.m.
Location: Burling First Floor Lounge

Please join the Grinnell College Libraries at 4:15 p.m., Nov. 7, as we continue our Faculty/Staff Research Series with Wenqi Yang, Mellon post-doctoral fellow, and lecturer in sociology and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies (GWSS), for her Research in Progress talk, “Coercion in Mediation.” In this talk, Yang demystifies police mediation in non-domestic violence incidents in mainland China. Her ethnographic work reveals how Chinese frontline officers utilize gender-based morality to coerce victims of domestic violence into a superficial reconciliation with the assailants. Such an inherently coercive mediation approach is shown to both revictimize victims of both genders and extend the parameters of “domestic” as in domestic violence. Refreshments will be served.

As a dedicated qualitative scholar, Yang’s focus is centered on exploring the evident and latent forms of gendered violence experienced by Chinese and Chinese American populations. She has presented their findings in three peer-reviewed articles and presented at numerous conferences.

Yang started her scholarly inquiry by studying how the communist government utilized gender to achieve its political and cultural utopia during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Her first book is entitled When Law Says Little: China’s Morality-based Police Mediation in Domestic Violence Incidents. Bringing state, police system, and individual police officers into the limelight, Yang shows how Chinese frontline police officers mediate non-criminal domestic violence incidents given the strained resources and their heterogeneous construction of domestic violence, as well as how their morality-based mediation strategies intersect with cultural and political understandings of family, marriage, and gender. Her second book, No More Iced Coke: Invisible Violence In First-Generation Chinese Americans' Postpartum Practice, focuses on the postpartum practices of first-generation Chinese American women in the Bay Area. Through observing the lived experiences of the new mothers, she reveals how the culturally and racially insensitive reproductive and postpartum care system in the US inhibits mothers of color from physically and mentally recovering from pregnancy and childbirth, thereby perpetuating a form of insidious violence and amplifying existing racial and gender disparities. In addition to these book projects, she is committed to the advancement of qualitative research methodologies. Specifically, she is interested in studying the pitfalls of practicing self-reflexivity for researchers with marginalized identities and the challenges encountered in multilingual fieldwork.

Yang’s teaching interests include courses addressing gender and racial inequalities, particularly in legal and medical systems, as well as qualitative research methodologies.

Yang received her Ph.D. and M.A. in East Asian studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022 and 2017, respectively; and B.A. in philosophy from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in 2014.