School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemScaling the ‘Ageing Migrant Body’ in Digital era: A Case of Older Chinese Migrants in Australia During the Covid-19 Pandemic(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024)Previous research on older migrants’ digital media use has primarily focused on understanding issues related to the ‘digital divide’, ‘transnational capital’, and ‘(im)mobility’. Few studies have investigated how these issues interplay and how they affect older migrants’ construction of selfhood, which informs their modalities of digital engagement. This article will address this gap, by drawing on the concept of ‘geographical scale’, to examine older Chinese migrants’ digital media use and their sense of self and belonging during COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne Australia. To achieve this, I analysed 31 interviews, which were collected from two sequential studies conducted in 2020 and 2021. The interview data revealed that older Chinese migrants’ diverse media practices and imaginaries are embedded in and informed by multiple sets of scales of the physical body, the family and domestic realm, the community sphere, and transnational network. It is found that digital media allow participants to navigate, negotiate with and even reconfigure these scales to cope with the challenges of ageing, migration and a global pandemic. However, digital media also produce new scales that differentiate older migrants from the rest of the population to sustain the structural inequality and social unevenness in Australia.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThis is us: pandemic storytelling, remembering and archiving by older Asian migrants in Victoria Photography and Video Exhibition(https://cocreating-covidsafe.com.au/exhibition, 2023)This is us: pandemic storytelling, remembering and archiving by older Asian migrants in Victoria Exhibition showcases the talents, emotions, stories and statements of older Asian migrants living throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Started as two successive studies on older Chinese, Sri Lankan and Indonesian migrants’ digital media use during Victoria’s lockdowns in 2020 & 2021, this Exhibition presents key outputs of the research and production projects over the past three years. The Exhibition offers a space of celebration, reflection and appreciation of some older members in our community, whose resilience and strength deserve our recognition & admiration.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCOVID-racism on social media and its impact on young Asians in Australia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-05-04)
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ItemHealth tracking media and the production of operational space: A critical analysis of Qantas Wellbeing App(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2023-01-01)This article examines the production of operational space amidst the rise of self- and data-tracking media, through the case study of the Qantas Wellbeing App. We draw on the operational paradigm in media studies to envisage how the Qantas Wellbeing App is embedded in the social-material relations between its users and the app, and the broader data-platform economy. By conceptualising the Qantas Wellbeing App as an operational media, the inquiry focuses on its designs and techniques that prompt users to fulfil prescribed tasks and follow instructions. We follow Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the production of space to evaluate three sets of social relations reconfigured by the Qantas Wellbeing App: human-to-human, human-to-machine, and data-to-data. By relying on qualitative evidence collected from an auto-ethnographic approach, our analyses focus on (1) spatial practices and (2) social relations constructed around the Qantas Wellbeing App between the authors to argue that social space is becoming a programmed reality that adheres to the logic of technological automation. Our analysis here affirms the app's capacity and objective to modify human behaviours and to evaluate how the app has recalibrated the authors’ respective and shared social spaces to create the needed condition of behaviour changes among the users. As social space is centred around human relations and activities, human agency and lives become secondary in an operational regime, which relies on data synchronisation to prosecute for the operational space and life.
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ItemEthnic community media can play a key role in a crisis – but it needs our support(The Coversation, 2022)
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ItemBooks Versus Screens: A Study of Australian Children's Media Use During the COVID Pandemic(SPRINGER, 2022-12)Abstract As children’s use of screens increased during the COVID pandemic, their reading of traditional books was affected, a national survey of Australian parents shows. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Melbourne to compare young people’s use of screens and books in the pandemic. Their online survey of 513 primary caregivers of children aged seven to thirteen around Australia showed that tablet use flourished during the pandemic and that COVID lockdowns influenced book buying and library borrowing in consequential ways for publishing and literature. Many parents believed their children’s use of screens had come at the expense of book reading.
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ItemCOVID-19 Contact Tracing and the Operationalisation of Somatechnics(EDINBURGH UNIV PRESS, 2022-08)This article draws on the paradigm of media operationalism to understand the somatechnical construction of bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the concept of somatechnics, one’s experience with the social world is articulated through the available technologies and techniques required to and developed from using these technologies ( Sullivan and Murray 2016 ). By drawing on the case of the Service Victoria app, the digital COVID-19 contact tracing system launched by the Victoria State government in Australia, I focus on the transformative meaning of technologies and somatechnics and how subjectivity is being redefined through the lens of technological utilisation. I suggest that all human-related forms of relations (human-to-human and human-to-machine) have become secondary and give way to the synchronic data-to-data relation of the app. In the regime of operational media, the body is not just a historical and cultural construction but a techno-transactional object that supports the optimisation of automated-decision making. The recent operational-turn in media studies provides a useful pathway to rethink the changing meaning of body and the human/technologies entanglement.
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ItemGoverning via platform during crisis: People's Daily WeChat Subscription Account (SA) and the discursive production of COVID-19(Taylor && Francis, 2022-05-05)In early 2020, China witnessed the first case of COVID-19. The nation strived to manage the situation through stringent measures with the help of digital technologies including platforms. This article investigates the discursive production of COVID-19 on People’s Daily Subscription Account (SA, dingyue hao), a state-affiliated media channel on the WeChat platform. Through a mixed approach using the walkthrough method and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article uncovers the power dynamics existing within WeChat and how such dynamics shape the mode of discursive production during the health crisis. Findings reveal the role of People’s Daily in commanding mainstream discursive production in support of the Chinese Communist Party’s continuous quest to legitimise its use of platform media to guide its political subjects and supervise everyday practices of social life. This article can potentially contribute to consolidating understandings of the role of platform media in shaping political governance in contemporary China.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableHow can we stop fake election news spreading in migrant communities?( 2022-05-02)Tackling fake news in CALD communities requires partnerships between governments, community groups and media organisations. There should be a particular focus on digital literacy of community leaders. And more resources should be devoted to improve journalists’ cultural competence in communicating with CALD Australians.
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ItemThe relationship between self-esteem and mental disability in patients with schizophrenia: the mediating role of resilience and the moderating role of gender(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-08-09)Noting the infrastructural turn in platform studies, the article conceives China's health code system, Jian Kang Ma (JKM), deployed to manage the COVID-19 crisis as a new social infrastructure that manifests the symbolic and material power of the Party State. Using the platform walkthrough method and documentary inquiry, we unpack the structures of platform governance and identify actors of the power to appreciate the socio-political dynamics of platform algorithms. JKM's structural power is not monolithic in the name of the Party State but supports a process of structuration that operates across multiple actors, administrative bodies and, governing layers. JKM has centralised data systems through the building of a nationwide algorithmic standard of COVID-19 governance. JKM typified the political dynamics of deterritorialisation, a reference to the state's governing mindset of eradicating local variants of policy implementation and governing autonomy in China. The removal of local power in pandemic administration has led to the production of a unified national subject. Such a comprehensive approach begs for greater nuance and sophisticated knowledge about those indigenous logics that platforms and algorithms operate and are embedded in, thus contributing to de-westernising platform studies.