Welcome Rachel Zhou, Director of the MA in Globalization

As of 1^st July 2024, Rachel Zhou is the new Director of the MA in Globalization. She is also a Professor in the Department of Health, Aging and Society (HA&S) at McMaster.

As a researcher, Rachel has widely published in the fields of globalization, immigration, global health, social policy, aging, and time studies. Her research interests are grounded in globalization and have evolved from earlier topics on immigration and HIV to recent ones on pandemic politics and global youth, for example. Her most recent scholarly publications include “HIV/AIDS, SARS, and COVID-19: the trajectory of China’s pandemic responses and its changing politics in a contested world” (2024, in Globalization and Health), “The lying flat movement, global youth, and globality: a case of collective reading on Reddit” (2023, in Globalizations), and “Vaccine nationalism: contested relationships between COVID-19 and globalization” (2021, in Globalizations), and Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalization: New Perspectives (published by Routledge, 2021).

We caught up with Rachel to talk about what led her to this role, what she’s excited about the most, and what she does outside of work.

Tell us about your academic and professional background.

I was a journalist in Beijing before going to the University of Toronto to pursue my graduate degrees in the late 1990s. While China has become the world’s second largest economy since 2010, back then it was a low-income country. My experience of living in different geographies and times – including the dramatic changes in the world in the past decades – has informed my inquiries, as well as my research lenses.

Since I joined McMaster in 2006, I have taught in three departments (IGHC, Social Work, and HA&S), which has nurtured and consolidated my interdisciplinary research and teaching. During the past many years, I have also created and taught several courses – including Designing Global Research (Global St 709), Global Social Governance (Global St 706), and Global Health Crises (Global St 749) – and supervised over 20 Major Research Paper projects for the MA Program in Globalization Studies, in addition to others.

What excites you most about this position?

What excites me most about this position is the opportunities to connect with both faculty members and students who are interested in global studies and to explore and collaborate on some intriguing teaching and research topics that are urgent in the present world. This pursuit is exemplified by a teaching innovation last year: we created a new graduate seminar course, “Global Urgent Issues (Global St 704)”, which was collectively taught by 12 faculty members from Social Sciences and Humanities and attracted over two dozen graduate students from different disciplines.

What research projects are you currently working on?

I am currently conducting a SSHRC-funded project entitled “Globalization, time, and nostalgia: A transnational conjunctural analysis”. This project aims to explore the prospects of contemporary globalization at the juncture of multiple crises (e.g., social, economic, political, environmental, and public health) through focusing on three case countries (the US, the UK, and China).  If you are interested in knowing more, check out its background paper, “Nostalgia in times of uncertainty: (Re)articulations of the past, present, and future of globalization” (published by the University of California Press, 2023).

Outside of academia, what do you like to do?

I love travelling when time allows, and have tremendously enjoyed hiking, photographing, gardening in my daily life.