Research
While she is a Visiting Fellow at CRASSH in 2019-20 Qing Bian’s research interests will focus on the Digital Memory of Chinese Youth. The overarching goal of the project is to explore the historical progress of the Internet technology, youth growth, and the transformation of China’s society.
This research will focus on the digital life-history of the Chinese young generation, especially the digital natives who were born after 1990, and social changes in the post-socialism context. It will use media memory as the theoretical tool and the life-story approach as the empirical methodology to record, interpret and explore the growth of young people in contemporary China and their Internet memories. The research questions to be addressed are:
1) An anthropological and oral history work of the young generation’s digital life.
How did new media technologies affect their lives and the construction of their
digital self and cultural and political identities?
2) What role did digital technologies play in their personal lives? How did they
understand the significance of the Internet in their growth?
3) How did they manage their past digital archive? What was remembered and what
was forgotten?
4) How did they think about the past, current and future digital self, technology and
China?
5) Digital memory gap among Chinese young generation: Class, digital inequality, China mainland vs Hong Kong, urban vs rural China, gender differences.
6) How do they fight for their generation’s memory in cyberspace?
About
Dr. Qing Bian is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies at the College of Arts and Media, Tongji University, Shanghai. She has published papers in the fields of Social Media, international communications, and Internet Politics in both Chinese and International high-impact journals. She has taught New Media and Social Development, Media Convergence and Data Journalism at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She served as a peer reviewer and guest editor for journals such as Chinese Journal of Communication and she was awarded “多闻雅集”（Duo Wen Ya Ji）visiting fellowship at City University of Hong Kong (2017). Her main research interests are new media and social transformation in China, focusing on online social movements, new media events, new media and youth culture research.
