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?
Hi! My name is Zhen Ye. I am currently working at Erasmus University Rotterdam as a lecturer. My research interests lie at the intersection of emergent technology, cultural production, and social power dynamics, with a particular focus on gender politics and East Asia media culture.
Where are you from?
While currently based in Rotterdam (NL), I grew up in Guangzhou (also known as Canton) in Southern China and lived in various cities including Beijing, Tokyo, London, and Amsterdam. (That means Rotterdam, as a vibrant modern Dutch city, is the smallest city I have lived in, but I like it a lot.)
What is your current area of study?
I recently finished my PhD research project, entitled, An Industry was Born: Investigating Livestreaming Cultural Production in China. The project investigates how livestreaming, as an emergent media technology, is adopted by social media platforms to affect the process of cultural production in China with an industrial-level sociotechnical approach. I examine the impact of livestreaming on both the macro-level (policy-making and industrial practices) and the micro-level (the creativity and autonomy of livestreamers and intermediaries), which contributes to the fields of media industries studies, platform studies, and cultural studies.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2024.
It was a great opportunity for me to present two works at AoIR 2024, including a solo research presentation and a co-authored piece on the pre-constituted panel.
The solo-author presentation I submitted to AoIR 2024 is called “When Industry Lore doesn’t Work: Exploring MCNs’ Limited Intermediary Roles in Promotional Culture.” It draws on rich data collected during a three-month ethnographic fieldwork at an MCN organization in Guangzhou, China, and 15 in-depth interviews with MCN practitioners. By analysing both the industrial lore (discourse) of MCN practitioners and their practices, I aim to illuminate valuable industrial knowledge on social commerce, fostering diverse and insightful discussion around the theme of “Industry”, at the panel of “Organisations & Leadership”.
The second work is part of a pre-constituted panel “Global Perspective on Platforms and Cultural Production”. My research, entitled “Douyin’s Playful Platform Governance: Platform’s Self-regulation and Content Creators’ Participatory Surveillance” offers a necessary perspective on understanding the state-platform relationship within the governance structure, considering different ontological and epistemological viewpoints. It presents a playful platform governance mechanism developed by Chinese social media platforms to mediate political pressures and optimise content creators’ self-discipline.
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?
AoIR 2024 will be my first AoIR conference experience. I’ve heard many stories about AoIR from colleagues and friends, and I am sure AoIR provides researchers with an open, mutually respectful, and intellectually stimulating environment for scholarly exchange. I am very much looking forward to meeting the AoIR communities and learning from all the interesting and great works that will be presented.
