My name is Fan Xiao (肖凡). I am a Postdoc at the Department of Media Studies, and a member of Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), at the University of Amsterdam.
My current research is part of the ERC-funded project Resilient Cultures - Music, Art, and Cinema in Mainland China and Hong Kong (RESCUE). In this ongoing project, I focus on resilient art institutes, of which I (temporarily) define as those persist in archiving, curating, and fostering resilient artistic networks in the face of changing geo-political situations.
Before joining UvA, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from Hong Kong Baptist University, where 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. in Global Communication from the The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a B.A. in Journalism from Sun Yat-Sen University. Once an aspired journalist, I’ve worked in various roles in the Chinese media industry. My academic research is more of a continuation of my ideation, in which I can critically reflect on social issues and examine different forms of actions.
For my cv, click here
Research skills & language proficiency
Contact me: fxiao [at] uva.nl
All visuals on this website are taken by me. Reuse is possible subjecting to authorization.