Hello. I am a sociologist interested in culture, work and employment, technology, sociology of time, emotions, and comparative sociology.

I recently completed my DPhil in Sociology at the University of Oxford, where I was a John Swire Scholar at St. Antony’s College, with full funding. I started as Lecturer at the School of Management, University of Leicester in the UK in fall 2024.

My research is on the cultural dimension of techno-capitalism. I am working on two lines of research. The first one examines how emergent technological infrastructures and labour regimes shape the cultural norms and perceptions of time. Papers under revision examine how workers make sense of and experience time scarcity, schedule instability, and workers’ imaginaries of futures. The second stream concerns more broadly the cultural and moral perceptions of precarity, and how these beliefs diverge across national contexts. Empirically, I focus on self-employed professionals in the global online freelancing labour market, also known as the remote gig economy.

I primarily work with interview and ethnographic data, both offline and online, but I also engage with survey data in collaborative projects. My current project focuses on China and Japan. In developing projects, I am extending my geographical focus to the UK.

Before graduate school, I worked as a creative in tech startup companies. When I am not working, I enjoy painting and collecting containers.

The letter ‘a’ in my last name, Loa, is silent.