Feeling Taiwan

In re-centering emotion in Taiwan Studies, a field long dominated by rationalist approaches, this interdisciplinary volume highlights how feelings—of belonging, grief, intimacy, distrust, and ambivalence—shape political life, social formations, and scholarly practice.

Its chapters range across colonial legacies, transitional justice, queer kinship, migrant representation, public health, disability, and more-than-human ethics, showing how emotions illuminate everyday experiences and reframe academic inquiry. By putting feeling in the foreground as both method and object, Feeling Taiwan benefits readers by offering new ways to interpret Taiwan’s histories and futures, while also modelling how to integrate reflexivity, positionality, and affect into research practice. It demonstrates that studying Taiwan is never only an intellectual endeavor, but also an affective one—an engagement that invites readers to reimagine scholarship, community, and otherwise.

This book will appeal to scholars and students in Taiwan Studies, Asian Studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, cultural studies, and gender/sexuality studies, as well as to researchers interested in the “affective turn”.

Po-Han Lee is an Associate Professor in the Global Health Program and the Institute of Health Policy and Management at National Taiwan University. He is trained in International Law in Taiwan and holds a PhD in Sociology from the United Kingdom. His research and activism engage critically with issues of gender, sexuality, disability, and health justice, and his recent scholarship explores feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches to global health law and the politics of knowledge in human rights, aiming to connect theory with social transformation.

Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Society and Environment at Queen Mary University of London. His research explores the intersections of critical public health, queer studies, and activist networks, with a particular focus on HIV/AIDS prevention and the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. He has published in journals including Culture, Health & Sexuality, and Critical Public Health.

Yu-chin Tseng is an Associate Fellow at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan, University of Tübingen. She previously served as a Junior Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at Tübingen from 2018 to 2025. Her research critically examines migration, intimacy, and state power in politically sensitive regions, particularly China and Taiwan. Tseng has published in leading journals such as the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and the Journal of Contemporary China. Her interdisciplinary scholarship bridges sociology, migration studies, and Asian politics, offering incisive analyses of emotion, aspiration, and mobility within the context of global migration.