Portia Jin Xiong (she/her) is a J.D./Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include the anthropology of law, gender, race, class, and higher education.
Xiong’s dissertation, “Admitted but Not Advanced: Diversity, Minor Feelings, Asian and Asian American Law Students in the United States,” investigates the structural barriers for Asians and Asian Americans to get equal opportunity and full inclusion in legal education and the legal profession. The backdrop for her dissertation is the paradoxical double stereotypes depicting Asians as both the successfully assimilated “model minority” and the unassimilable “perpetual foreigner” amid the rise in anti-Asian violence in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Xiong received her B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University and her M.A. in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.