Hsin-I Cheng

Hsin-I Cheng is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. She studies human communication through historical and sociopolitical lenses with methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviewing, and discourse analyses. Her first book Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism investigates the experiences of Taiwanese and Chinese communities living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border from a critical communication perspective. Her second book Cultivating membership in Taiwan and beyond: Relational citizenship proposes the theory of “relational citizenship,” rooted in the Taiwanese context, to explain the communicative nature of membership and belonging. Her most recent co-edited collection: Resistance in the era of nationalisms: (Per)Forming identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong will be published in 2023 by Michigan State University Press. This collection focuses on how people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, two post-colonial and cosmopolitan societies, strive for autonomy over their democratic ways of life despite the tumultuous relations between China and the United States. Her work is published in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Western Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Women & Language. Her current research focus is on Asian American diasporic communities in their identity negotiations, and relationships between racial minorities in the United States. She collaborated with her students to build the multilingual Asian & Black Alliance website to promote Black-Asian solidarity. Hsin-I Cheng's research interests cross the disciplinary boundaries of communication, intersectionality studies, citizenship and immigration studies from (post)colonial and transnational perspectives. She received her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, M.A. from UW-Milwaukee, and B.A. from Fu-Jen Catholic University in Taiwan.