Zed Zhipeng Gao

Zed Zhipeng Gao received his MA (2013) and PhD (2018) in psychology from York University. He is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. He studies Chinese immigrants' racial and national identities, belonging and mental health amid international tensions and the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, he has been publishing on psychology in socialist and post-socialist China.

Zed has approximately 20 essays published/forthcoming in major refereed journals and edited volumes. His representative works can be found in Review of General Psychology, Social Anthropology, History of Psychology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, and Narrative Inquiry. He is currently guest editing a special issue on theoretical contributions from China and the Chinese diaspora to international psychology for Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science (Springer). He recently won the Outstanding Early Career Psychologist Award (outside the US) from the International Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association.

Select publications:

Gao, Z. (Forthcoming). Guest editor of Special Issue “Contemporary Innovations in Theory: Contributions from China and Chinese Diaspora”, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, Springer. The special issue consists of 14 original research articles and 4 commentaries. Authors are from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and US.

Gao, Z. (Conditionally accepted). Unsettled belongings: Chinese immigrants’ mental health vulnerability as a symptom of international politics in the COVID-19 pandemic. Conditionally accepted by Journal of Humanistic Psychology.  

Gao, Z. (In press). Unsettled Belongings in Deglobalization: Chinese Immigrants’ Struggle for Political Identity by Using Transnational Media in the COVID-19 Pandemic. In J. Pollock & D. Vakoch (Ed.) Coronavirus in International Media, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Gao, Z. (2020). From empirical observation to social intervention: The Marxization of psychology in China, 1949–1958. In W. Pickren & T. Teo (Eds.) Special issue “Re-envisioning general psychology”. Review of General Psychology, 24(1), 43-59.

Gao, Z. (2020). “Gems unwrought can form nothing useful”: Socialist China’s pedagogical erasure of individuality, 1949–1958. History of Education, 49(5), 661-681.

Gao, Z. (2019). Forging Marxist psychology in China’s Cold War geopolitics, 1949–1965. In H. Y. Wu (Ed.) Special issue “History of psychology and psychiatry in the global world”. History of Psychology, 22(4), 309-327.

 Gao, Z. & Bischoping, K. (2019). The Communist hero and the April Fool’s joke: A case study in the cultural politics of authenticity and fakery. In M. Krings, C. Kilian & J. Beek (Eds.) Special issue “An anthropology of defrauding and faking”. Social Anthropology, 27(3), 438-454.

Gao, Z. & Bischoping, K. (2018). The emergence of an elder-blaming discourse in 21st-century China. In L. L. Thang & W-J. J. Yeung (Eds.) Special issue “Elder-care issues in Southeast and East Asia”. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 33(2), 197-215.