Kimberly Chang

Kimberly Chang, associate professor of cultural psychology, holds a B.A. in psychology from William Smith College, and an M.A. in international relations, M.S. in multicultural counseling, and Ph.D. in social and political psychology from Syracuse University.

Her teaching and research focuses on the psychology of globalization and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and citizenship for those whose lives span national borders and cultural worlds.

She takes a critical ethnographic and community-based approach to learning and is particularly interested in the intersections of social research and creative writing.

She is a participating faculty member in Hampshire's China Exchange Program and the Five College Asian Pacific American Studies Program. She has lived and worked extensively in Hong Kong and China, and previously taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Recent and Upcoming Courses

Ways of Knowing in CSI: Interpretive Approaches to Social Research
This course is designed for students transitioning into Division II to introduce them to faculty in the School of Critical Social Inquiry: the kinds of questions we ask, research methodologies we use, and writing we produce. Each week, a faculty guest speaker will share a recent research project, focusing on the "behind the scenes" stories of the intentions, dilemmas, and choices that informed their research. Together we will read and think critically about the epistemological assumptions behind methodology, the power of method to enable or limit particular kinds of knowledge, and the ethics of socially engaged scholarship. Each student will develop a viable research proposal on a subject of their own choosing, while learning how to be more intentional, creative, and ethical in their own research and writing choices.
Dis-Orientation: A Critical Ethnography of Hampshire College
Critical ethnography is a way of knowing about the cultural worlds we live in through our reflexive participation in and writing about those worlds. Like going to college, doing critical ethnography requires disorientation in order to begin to question what we take for granted and learn through our engagements with others. In this tutorial, first-year students will learn the disorienting methods of critical ethnography as a way of knowing about the intersecting cultural worlds that make up Hampshire College. Each student will carry out a semester-long ethnographic project and will be guided through the process of posing ethnographic questions, conducting fieldwork and interviews, grappling with the ethics of participatory research, writing field notes and other forms of ethnographic documentation, and engaging in the critical reflexive act of interpretation and writing. Through this ethnographic exploration of Hampshire, students will gain an understanding of the method, the college, and themselves.
Critical Ethnography: Following the Chinese Food
Chinese food is more American than apple pie, suggests writer Jennifer Lee in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. In this course, we will take Chinese food as our starting point for exploring food as a system that connects individuals and communities, locally and globally. Students will carry out a multi-sited ethnographic research project that begins with a question about Chinese food, whether about production and consumption, identity and belonging, health and environment, memory and desire, community and activism. Students will "follow the Chinese food" wherever their questions take them-from restaurant to market to factory to farm-and be guided through the process of posing ethnographic questions, conducting fieldwork and interviews, writing fieldnotes and other forms of ethnographic documentation, and engaging throughout in the critical, reflexive act of interpretation and writing. As part of the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment, students in this course will receive a small research stipend to use during the semester and may apply for a more substantial summer research grant to further their project locally or take it to China.
Crafting Truth: Research and Imaginings at the Borders of Non/Fiction
In this course, we will explore the relationship between methods of critical social inquiry and creative forms of writing and representation. While discipline has traditionally bound method to form in the social sciences, we ask: what forms are necessary for conveying what kinds of truths? We will consider the possibilities and limits of our research tools-the interview, the archive, ethnography, memory-while working the borders of non/fiction for the kinds of knowledge to which different forms give us access. We will look at examples of hybrid non/fiction forms including ethnographic fiction, documentary theatre, experimental memoir, and the lyric essay along with the genre-bending work of Gloria Anzaldua, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, B.J. Hollars, Shailja Patel, Paisley Rekdal, and Art Spiegelman. We will also hold a weekly hybrid documentary film series. Students will consider questions of craft, as they research, imagine, and workshop pieces of their own writing and explore their choices as researchers and writers in search of form.