My name is Fan Xiao (肖凡). I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. From fall 2024, I will be joining the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam as a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC project Resilient Cultures - Music, Art, and Cinema in Mainland China and Hong Kong.
My research focuses on Chinese subcultural communities, popular gender discourses, and platform economy, exploring the intersection of popular culture, digital media, and consumer culture. My PhD thesis, titled Consumerist Feminism in China: Women and Beauty Culture in E-commerce Live-Streaming, examines the beauty culture among young, urban Chinese women with their increasingly frequent use of e-commerce live-streaming. I explore not only young Chinese women’s perception about beauty care and self-betterment, but also the changing gender dynamics as in the female-oriented performance of Li Jiaqi. During my PhD study, I also research on subcultural communities in relation to platform labor, alternative gender discourses, and socially supportive learning.
Methodologically, I combine media ethnography with the digital methods approach. I have conducted media ethnography of various subcultural communities, while making use of digital affordances of social media to inspect flows of digital communication and interacions. For data analysis, I explore mixed-method research which combines computational methods (e.g., natural language processing, network analysis, machine learning) and qualitative close reading (e.g., multimodal discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, thematic analysis). I am now exploring new tools that can enable more in-depth analysis of multimodal media content, including keyframe analysis and sonic analysis.
I obtained my M.A. degree from the School of Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a B.A. degree from the School of Journalism and Communication, Sun Yat-Sen University. Once an aspired journalist, I’ve worked in various roles in the Chinese media industry. Swithing track to the academia has been challenging, but also very meaningful and rewarding to me. After trying many different spots, I eventually realize that these seemingly divergent paths are actually going to the same direction. For they are always motivated by my joy, my unrest, and my disorientation as a small-city girl living in a cosmopolitan fantasy.
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Research skills & language proficiency
Contact me: xiaofan [at] life.hkbu.edu.hk
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