Academic Work
About
Anthony Shu is a UCLA PhD candidate specializing in cultural, organizational, and economic sociology.
His dissertation is an ethnography of a professional wrestling school that explores how performers manage and perform authenticity in the face of consumer skepticism and antagonism. This project also looks into the rapid, high-risk coordination of trust and accounting of bodily capital entailed by pro wrestling.
For another project, Anthony is investigating how organizational identities and their material implications influence firm growth among social entrepreneurs in the CPG food space. Alongside his dissertation, he maintains a research interest in food as a site of cultural and economic production.
In his previous research, he studied how restaurateurs present Asian cuisine in casual and upscale restaurants and explored the stratification of nation-states’ culinary prestige through a mixed-methods study that combined ethnographic work at the 2015 World Expo with a statistical examination of the Michelin Guide.
Anthony is also committed to public scholarship and works as a freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in Eater, KQED, The Six Fifty, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Palo Alto Weekly, The Almanac, Mountain View Voice, and Redwood City Pulse.
Dissertation Committee: Omar Lizardo (Chair), Gabriel Rossman, Stefan Timmermans, Ashley Mears
General Shu's 