Workshop Agenda

Exploring Interactions in Institutional Settings: Opportunities and Challenges of Sythesizing Multiple Perspectives  

• Date: February 27, 2026
• Venue: Room 620, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University
• Host: Behavioral and Big Data Lab, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University
• Support: National Natural Science Foundation of China Key Project (72134003) and Tsinghua University Independent Research Program (2024THZWJC13)

Tips:

This workshop persists in promoting environmentally - friendly practices and exerts maximum efforts to reduce carbon emissions through the following initiatives and measures:

1. -Participants are encouraged to bring their own water bottles. On each floor of the school building, there are water purifiers that offer both hot and room - temperature purified water. Tea and coffee will also be provided.
2. -Please use this circulated electronic version of the workshop agenda. For partipants with special requirements, it is recommended that you print it out by yourself.

Coordinators: 

1. -Yuan Zheng:  Tel: XX;  Email:XX@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn 
2. -Xuran Li: Tel: XX; Email: XX@tsinghua.org.cn

Themes

This workshop brings together scholars from different disciplines to share experiences and research on interactions in institutional settings; discuss the opportunities and challenges of sythesizing perspectives from different traditions; and look for consensus on theories and methods.

Agenda 

Each speaker has 20 mins to present the research and 25 mins for Q&A. 

Bios of Speakers and Participants 

Xiaoli Lu

Xiaoli Lu (PhD, Utrecht University) is Tenured Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, Associate Director of Center for Crisis Management Research, and Executive Director of the Behavior and Data Science Lab. Lu has published widely on topics of crisis and disaster management, and organizational issues. His recent book is Managing uncertainty in crisis: exploring the impact of institutionalization on organizational sense making. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, and serves on the editorial boards of 8 journals and the boards of two societies, including the China Society of Emergency Management, and the Chinese Public Administration Society. He is also the co-founders of the Academic (formerly Youth) Sub-forum and Summer School affiliated to the Forum of Fifty on Emergency Management. He was a visiting fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a UNESCO Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex. Lu's current research interests include sensemaking of bureaucrats at both strategic and operational levels, video method in organizational analysis, and field experiments in governmental settings.

Nicolas Legewie

Nicolas Legewie is a professor for research methodology at the Institute for Sociology, University of Münster. His research focuses on developing and advancing methods of empirical social research, with a particular emphasis on video data analysis and computer vision techniques for the social sciences. Substantively, he examines the intersection of social inequality and artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of migration, integration, and education. One current project uses an audit study approach to assess bias and political leanings of large language model–based chatbots, contributing to our understanding of AI systems that increasingly shape information retrieval, content production, and communication worldwide.

Anne Nassauer

Anne Nassauer is a sociologist with a research focus on interactions, deviant and collective behavior, and the use of 21st century video data for scientific inquiry. She has brought an empirical interactionist perspective to protest violence, robberies, and officer-involved shootings and has published methodological and theoretical articles on novel avenues in micro-sociology. She often combines Video Data Analysis and interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives with the goal to better understand social interaction.

Nan Wang

Nan Wang is an Associate Professor in the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学), China. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research centers on conversation analysis and social interaction in institutional settings, with a particular focus on doctor-patient interactions and medical decision-making processes in Chinese contexts. She is the author of The Social Nature of Antibiotic Overprescription in China: Medical Conversations, Doctor-Patient Relationships, and Decision-Making (Routledge, 2024) and has published in leading journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, and Research on Language and Social Interaction. Her recent work examines treatment recommendation sequences, resistance to medical authority, patient participation in treatment decision-making, and the micro-level interactional dynamics contributing to antibiotic overprescribing and suboptimal medication adherence among patients in chronic disease management.

Shengfa Miao

Shengfa Miao is an Associate Professor and Graduate Supervisor at the School of Software and School of Artificial Intelligence, Yunnan University. He serves as Deputy Director of the Engineering Research Center of Cross-border Cyberspace Security, Ministry of Education. He holds dual Ph.D. degrees from Leiden University (Netherlands) and Lanzhou University, and has conducted postdoctoral research at Leiden University and the University of Twente. He has previously worked as a Data Scientist and Senior Machine Learning Engineer at leading enterprises including Vodafone Netherlands, SF Express, and Fengtu Technology.

His research focuses on intelligent logistics, intelligent risk control, digital twins, and structural health monitoring. Currently, he leads one Major Science and Technology Special Project of Yunnan Province, one sub-project of the National Key R&D Program, one Ministry of Education Industry-University Collaboration Project, and three industry-academia partnership projects. He has published over 50 papers in renowned domestic and international journals and conferences.

Hao Xu

Hao Xu is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs, Center for Emergency Management Research, Xiamen University. He earned his PhD in Public Administration from the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University. His research mainly focuses on street-level bureaucracy, institutional interaction and crisis management.

Wei Hong

Wei Hong, Associate Professor of Sociology at Tsinghua University. Her earlier work focuses on people and organizations that produce scientific knowledge, analyzing Chinese scientists from the perspectives of scientific field, social networks, gender and technology transfer. Relevant papers appear in Social Studies of Science，Science Technology & Human Values，Research Policy, Minerva, and EASTS. Her work experience in the STS institute at Tsinghua University transforms her from an external to an internal sociologist of science and technology. Sustainable Transformations and Everyday Life is one major research area of her research group.

Yuan Zheng

Yuan Zheng is a doctoral candidate at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include conflict in group interaction and video-based research.

Xuran Li

Xuran Li is a doctoral candidate at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include conflict in risk and crisis management.