Background
I embarked on my journey of studying communication since I was an undergraduate in my hometown Shanghai, China. With an interest in interdisciplinary approaches to cultural and social issues of new media technologies, I obtained my Master’s training in Communication, Culture, and Technology with an Asian Studies graduate certificate at Georgetown University. Then I completed my Ph.D. in Media and Communication with a Gender and Women’s Studies minor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to the University of Hawaiʻi, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. These experiences have given me transnational and critical lenses in understanding the intersection of communication, technology, and culture.
Education
- PhD, Communications and Media, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, 2023
- MA, Communication, Culture, and Technology, Georgetown University, 2017
- BA, Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2015
Specializations
Digital cultures; platform economies; and critical technology studies.
Research
I study issues of identity, relationship, governance, and resistance within global digital cultures and economies. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I combine ethnographical and discursive approaches to research how emerging information and communication technologies such as platforms, algorithms, and data mediate diverse forms of cultural production and social relations. I am currently working on my book project, titled Scalable Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Chinese Live Streaming. Using methodologies including platform walkthrough, ethnography, interviews, policy analysis, and discourse analysis, this book project provides a sociotechnical and critical cultural analysis of how identities and socialites are mediated at scale within platformized cultural production.