Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
Shichang Duan.
A postdoc working in Anthropology Department, University of Amsterdam
Where are you from?
I was born in rural China and have been based in the Netherlands for 4 years.
What is your current area of study?
Platformization, labor studies and infrastructure studies.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2024
I will present my research based on my ethnography as a live streamer in rural China. This research explores how e-commerce streamers living in marginalized area perform authenticity and how their practices differ from micro-celebrities in the Western world, contributing to a global perspective on platform labor. While existing scholarship mainly focuses on digital influencers, artists, and game streamers, the diverse platform worker figures in non-western social context are undertheorized, such as the arising ecommerce live streamers in China, remain understudied. Douyin, the sibling version of Tiktok, encourages sellers to creatively present the authenticity of products through live streaming to attract consumers, and Douyin (2013) emphasizes that marginalized social groups, such as rural Chinese, could benefit by presenting themselves and their real life. Under such mobilization discourse, more than 1,100,000 e-commerce streamers are emerging in China by 2023. Many rural residents creatively stream the authentic rurality, and their labor process beyond the discursive construction will be detailed in my presentation.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2024 in Sheffield is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
It’s my very first time to present at AoIR. I plan to join this conference because many friends recommend it and I do find many interesting topics on the conference in past years. I’m willing to exchange ideas with and receive feedback from other scholars.
