Weijun Yuan admits that sometimes, it feels like her advisors have more faith in her than she does in herself. "Professor Yang Su has always communicated high expectations of me, and sometimes I even feel he has more confidence in me than myself," she says. But the proof is in the pudding.

A sixth-year Ph.D. student in the sociology department, Yuan studies collective action, networks, and organization. She's developed a reputation for using digital trace data to examine dynamics and outcomes of social movements.

Yuan has almost too many achievements to mention. She’s been invited, twice, to present her pioneering research at Notre Dame's selective Young (or Early Career) Scholars Conference and has been a project leader and opening speaker at Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences' Computational Social Science Summer Schools and Research Incubator, in Germany, which assembles varied scholars to incubate projects on social cohesion. Last year, she was the lead author on a Social Forces paper about how social movements gain news attention. She has three additional journal publications under her belt already and has contributed to three more peer-reviewed book chapters. At UCI, she won last year's award for best graduate research in the sociology department.

Put simply? "She is one of the best Ph.D. students the department has ever had," says Su.

The first substantive paper of her dissertation, which considers why and how diverse activists unite, won the 2024 Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Student Paper Award from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association. The two other papers that comprise her dissertation, which centers on the anti-extradition amendment bill protests that began in 2019 in Hong Kong, seek to understand how activist groups reach consensus about their demands and react to state repression.

One big thing she's been pondering is why activist groups endorse others whose radicalism or moderation deviate from their own positions. “Scholars have studied factionalism. But why do activists sometimes reach across factional divides?” Yuan says. She found that they strategically adapt to shifting political opportunities and audience scopes. “Their calculations are based on the image of the movement they want to convey to different audiences,” she says.

Instead of interviews, Yuan's dissertation papers rely on data from online messaging software. "Telegram is the most popular social media platform that Hong Kong protesters use to communicate with one another and with the general public," she says. Yuan analyzed more than 700,000 posts from 89 Telegram broadcasting channels, what she calls "traces of actions that are left on the digital world." Activists provided a wealth of information, collecting and processing information in a professional way. In a broadcasting channel that reports on protests and police actions, for example, channel admins initially crowdsource raw event information. They then verify this information by cross-checking various sources. Only verified news with photos is posted on the channel.

Yuan's focus stems from her own globetrotting background. Born in southern China and raised in the north, she studied history at Beijing's Tsinghua University and worked as a researcher and coordinator at the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, in Costa Rica, before moving to San Diego for her master's. She also did research in Australia and Chile, but it was her experience in China and the U.S. that really shaped her interests. "In China, I was always intrigued by how collective action could emerge," she says. "Whereas in the U.S., it seems so easy to initiate protests. But the harder part is to get substantive outcomes."

In 2019, she started her Ph.D. program at UCI and began using quantitative and computational methods to study political processes leading to social change. "UC Irvine has ample resources," she says, particularly when it comes to research on movements and networks. "We have probably the strongest cluster of scholars working on these areas." Irvine proved to be a good base for her in other ways, too.

"I hadn't stayed in one place for more than three years, and this is the first place I found that's more like a home," she says. "I feel a lot of sense of belonging to Irvine. As graduate students, we are very much defined by our research, right? And I found that my research got supported in this community, and people appreciate what I do."

"Weiwei is just an amazing young scholar," says her advisor Edwin Amenta, UCI professor of sociology and political science. "She combines great talent for sociology with an extreme desire to learn and a confidence that she can. She is simply outstanding."

In light of all the accolades for her research, Yuan finds her greatest joy in mentoring other students. In addition to helping undergraduate and grad students with research and methods at UCI, she finds time to volunteer as an evaluator for the annual research symposium at Orange Coast College, in Costa Mesa, where she's already developed some long-term relationships with mentees.

"There's a new generation of scholars doing theoretically driven and methodologically rigorous research with substantive interests," she says. As she prepares to defend her Ph.D. in 2025, she's on the market for a position at a research university. She hopes to become a professor of sociology and help students fulfill the promise of their own talents, as well. "That's really my big passion," she says.

—Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences