Dr. Zhuo Ban is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Global Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research takes a global, critical perspective to contemporary issues in Organizational Communication and Public Relations, such as globalized supply chains, offshore labor politics, and corporate social responsibility discourses. Specifically, she is interested in how industrial workers in Southern China and other offshore manufacturing units construct their identities as marginalized publics in the global diffusion of production. She is also interested in the study of global-local dialectics of labor activism, from consumer-based activism in the US to grassroots organizing in sweatshop sites in the Global South. Her research has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals including Organization, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Public Relations Inquiry, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.
Before joining UCSB in 2026, Ban was an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati. She received a PhD in Communication from Purdue University.
Research Interests
- Migrant and Immigrant Labor
- Marginality and Community Organizing
- Discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility
- The Global South, BRICS, Emerging Economies
Current Projects
Book in preparation: Distemporality in the global machine: supply chain labor and the discourse of time.
Selected Publications
- Ban, Z. & Fairhurst, G (Forthcoming). Exploring the Real and Perceived Limits of Organizational Discourse Analysis for Leadership Studies. Handbook of Qualitative Leadership Research Methods. De Gruyter.
- Ban, Z. (2025). Feminist Organizing in Marginalized Knowledge Communities: A Case Study of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) Bank. Women’s Studies in Communication, 48(2), 180–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2025.2483679
- Ban, Z., Zoller, H. M., & Nandurkar, B. K. (2025). Leadership Communication and Resistance. The Routledge Handbook of Organizational Leadership Communication, 241–254. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003380115-20
- Jiang, J., Ban, Z., & Jiang, W. (2024). Hero-making in Chinese and U.S. news during COVID-19: The warrior and leader images of Zhong Nanshan and Anthony Fauci. Health Communication, 1–11 https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2419703
- Ban, Z. (2023). Emotional communities in the economy of emotions: A Study of discursive muscularity in networked mobilization of fan groups in China. In Pal, M., Cruz, J., Munshi, D. (Eds.) Organizing at the Margins. New Perspectives in Organizational Communication. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22993-0_11