I am a Ph.D. student and Graduate Teaching Associate at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University. I am also a Graduate Fellow 2024-2025 at the Global Human Rights Hub, ASU.
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My research investigates the cultural, ethical, and socio-technical dimensions of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digital media. Grounded in several years of industry experience as a senior product operator and content moderation editor at leading tech firms such as ByteDance and Douyu Live Streaming (NASDAQ: DOYU), I bring a practitioner’s lens to study innovative technologies.
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Drawing on this dual perspective, my work explores how emerging technologies intersect with different cultural communities and their everyday digital life, especially within intercultural and international contexts. I aim to build interdisciplinary, communication-centered frameworks that deepen our understanding of digital religion, digital privacy and data practices, and human-machine communication.
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My past and current research spans three key themes: (1) exploring how religious (and/or spiritual) organizations and communities negotiate AI presence and adoption, (2) understanding power asymmetries embedded in human-AI interaction across Chinese newsrooms, and (3) analyzing how digital infrastructures shape normative practices around data, identity, and memory.
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Methodologically, I am a qualitatively driven mixed-methods researcher. I integrate in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and computational text analysis, such as topic modeling, to explore how emerging technologies shape meaning, power, and identity. My work draws on interdisciplinary insights from communication studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the sociology of religion.
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I obtained my master's degree (Master's of Social Science, specialising in Digital Media and Society) from the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University in Sweden and a B.A. degree (Journalism) at Linyi University in China. Before embarking on my PhD studies, I served as an Instructor in the Department of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University Mainland campus (UIC).