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NEW VISITOR TO THE DIGITAL MEDIA AND SOCIETY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMME

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Xiaoxian Wang is a digital ethnographer who researches young people's interaction with digital media and technologies and their identity construction. She received her PhD in Media and Communication Studies from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in December 2022. In her dissertation ‘Practice, identity, and tactic: Young Chinese vloggers’ interaction with the social media platform Bilibili’, she examined the tactical practices and identity constructions of young vloggers in dealing with the structural pressures of the platform economy and influencer culture.

A black-haired woman smiles at the camera. She is sitting at a table drinking tea. She is wearing a beige jumper and has a blue ribbon around her neck.
Xiaoxian Wang begins work as a Visiting Post-Doc at the Chair of Media and Communication Studies.

She was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Media Culture & Policy Lab at KU Leuven, where she taught courses on digitalisation, media and crises and communicative challenges and supervised master's theses in the Digital Media and Society programme. Her research has been published in journals such as Celebrity Studies, Journal of Youth Studies, Global Media and China, Asian Anthropology and Feminist Media Studies. She has also contributed to edited volumes such as the De Gruyter Handbook of Media Economics.


She is Vice-Chair of the Management Team of the Mediatisation Section of ECREA. Her current research interests include romantic human-AI interactions, the vulnerability, strategies and subjectivity of content creators, and the well-being of influencers in digital labour markets.

The fellowship programme Digital Media and Society enables research stays at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at Leipzig University and serves to strengthen collaboration with international researchers in the study of networked communication and digital media. The focus is on the areas of (1) media culture research, in particular media-related forms of practice in their cultural, socio-technical and temporal contexts; (2) digital communication, primarily the production and appropriation of digital networked media technologies and forms of communication; (3) media analysis, in particular the reconstruction of media content, its (multimodal, transmedia) modes of representation and discourse formations in comparison with different forms of communication and media systems.


The fellowship programme is supported by the Chair of Media and Communication Studies and financed by Leipzig University. It covers travelling expenses and the stay in Leipzig. Fellows are provided with a workplace at the Chair of Media and Communication Studies.