Charles Lee

Charles T. Lee is Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation. Working across the fields of political theory, cultural studies, cultural politics, and critical citizenship studies, his research is broadly concerned with innovative formations of political agency and cultural resistance within the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism. His first book, Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change (Duke University Press, 2016), investigates the everyday practices of abject subjects such as migrant domestic workers, global sex workers, and transgender people as alternative enactments of citizenship, and examines the unconventional lessons these improvisations offer for social movement activism. The book received the 2017 Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award from the Institute for Humanities Research.

His second book, The Art of Elastic Politics: Ethnic Food, Immigrant Lives and Multiracial Neoliberalism (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2026), examines how immigrant food practices generate new political imaginaries in the shifting contours of neoliberal capitalism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Southern California’s Asian restaurant industry, this book develops the concept of elasticity as a theoretical framework for navigating neoliberalism’s contradictions. It explores how the interplay of ethnic entrepreneurship, immigrant labor, and cultural consumption creates subtle, nonlinear opportunities for resistance, empowerment, and citizenship contestation. Organized around the themes of Elastic Food, Elastic Citizenship, and Elastic Governance, this interdisciplinary study – bridging political theory, cultural studies, food studies, and posthumanism – offers flexible and nuanced frameworks for engaging the challenges and complexities of migration, citizenship, governance, and global capitalism in a rapidly evolving world.

He also has a sustained interest in mindfulness and contemplative practices. His current project explores the cultural politics of contemplative mind-body practices in the evolving landscape of global capitalism.  

Lee's writings have appeared in journals such as Theory & Event; Contemporary Political Theory; Women's Studies Quarterly; Critical Studies on Terrorism; Peace Review; Perspectives on Politics; New Political Science; Social Inclusion; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Journal of Contemplative Inquiry; The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics; as well as the edited volumes, Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, Core Concepts in Sociology, and The Global Citizenship Nexus: Critical Studies. He currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Citizenship Studies and the Social Justice Council at ASU's Center for Mindfulness, Compassion and Resilience. Previously, he has served as the Chair of the Status Committee of Asian Pacific Americans in the Profession and Co-Chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus at the American Political Science Association; Graduate Director of Justice Studies at the School of Social Transformation; and on the Governance Grievance Committee at the University Senate.