Specialization:
Ph.D., Purdue University, Organizational Communication, Public Relations
Labor Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Discourse of (Im)migrant Labor,, Culture and
Globalization
Bio:
Dr. Zhuo Ban is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and
Department of Global Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research takes
a global, critical perspective to contemporary issues in Organizational Communication and
Public Relations, such as globalized supply chains, offshore labor politics, and corporate
social responsibility discourses. Specifically, she is interested in how industrial workers in
in Southern China and other offshore manufacturing units construct their identities as
marginalized publics in the global diffusion of production. She is also interested in the
study of global-local dialectics of labor activism, from consumer-based activism in the US to
grassroots organizing in sweatshop sites in the Global South. Her work has been published
in international peer-reviewed journals including Organization, Management
Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Public Relations
Inquiry, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.