Current Projects
Reassembling Digital Placemaking: Participation and Politics
I am developing my doctoral thesis as a full-length book. Digital placemaking, an emerging phenomenon at the intersection of the placemaking industry and digital media technologies, unsettles contemporary urban politics by blurring the formal and informal placemaking practices. Looking beyond the dichotomised framing of digital technologies as either liberalising forces or techno-capitalistic dominance, With evidences from Australia, China and Taiwan, this work explores how new forms of civic engagement implicate urban democracy in the digital era.
This book is set to be published by Routledge in 2024.
Countering Disinfomation
Countering Disinformation investigates how to effectively counter disinformation operations including fake news, conspiracy theories and propaganda by mobilising and collaborating among civil society, social media platforms and governments. Disinformation, purposeful dissemination of false information, poses threats to contemporary society, as they distort reality perceptions of reality and can elude existing fact-checking mechanisms.
Collaborator Dr Lennon Chang
While newly arrived migrants, refugees and asylum seekers (MRAS) are sometimes depicted as the recipients and social inclusion programs through arts and cultural means, they are often underrepresented and under-supported as professionals and producers who enable multiculturism. This project addresses an absence of MRAS roles and contributions in scholarship, policy and public perception of the creative economy.
Economic participation, fair access to markets and resources and innovative technologies are central to the well-being and prosperity of migrant and refugee communities. This research priority focuses on migrants and asylum seekers as enterprising and active agents. It helps solve new problems that arise with the current conditions of employment, emerging business models and changed policy priorities to advance inclusive and sustainable societies.
Key collaborator Prof Paul Long
Digital Studio, the University of Melbourne
Research and author a report on models of digital humanities, arts and social sciences (DHASS) support and training in Australia
This project directly addresses the Studio’s central goal of increasing researcher participation and cultivating the next generation of DHASS researchers.
Part of an international collaboration, the project examines the existing Digital Humanities and Social Science (DHASS) training resources in Canada and Australia and engages in monthly meeting and conversation with a team of Critical Digital Humanities Initiative scholars (led by Dr Elspeth Brown) based at the University of Toronto.
The project is in the process of producing an environmental scan of the Australian DH training sector and initial recommendations for best practices in supporting DH training in Australian universities. It also aims to publish two academic journal articles in 2024, also hosting the team visit from the University of Toronto in late February 2023.
Main collaborator: Prof David Goodman
Previous Projects
Countering CCP-sponsored Disinformation Campaigns: Taiwan as an Example
March 2020 - December 2021
Chinese state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have attracted increasing media attention and global think tanks. Yet, academia has yet to join the discussions. Based on big data facilitated case studies, our project examines two disinformation campaigns that target Taiwan regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as Taiwan’s countermeasures. Our paper explores the communicative routes and major actors in such campaigns. In a non-democratic and highly-controlled information ecology, the media industries, social media, online communities and Taiwan-based local communities are all susceptible to disinformative mobilization. Particularly, it has acquired the strategy of the “people’s route” afforded by media technologies and social networks. The success of Taiwan’s counter strategies relies on an all-in “participatory politics” that requires collaboration between government, non-government actors and the public participation. Understanding Chinese state-sponsored disinformation campaigns not only illuminates on the modus operandi of the current authoritarian system, it also offers lessons for other countries.
Art and Cosmopolitanism in the Digital Era
July - August 2021
In a world fraught by strife and division and yet that is criss-crossed by a highly energised tangle of digital and human networks, what is the role of cosmopolitanism today? Is cosmopolitanism merely a dated Western concept or does it have more to offer than ever in terms of the resources it might provide to bridge gaps across seeming chasms of cultural difference or to explain the deep reserves of goodwill and commonality that sustain global interconnectedness? And what role might be played by the visual and sound arts in sustaining established relationships and forging new ones? In this conference we bring together scholars and arts practitioners from China, Australia, Europe and the US to explore these themes with the hope of setting new directions for the discussion of art and cosmopolitanism in the digital era.
Symposium brochure download here
Symposium documentation here
The “Representing Families on Instagram” Study
June - October 2018
The project explores different family representations on Instagram, through a qualitative study of a purposive sample of posts (images and text) related to family relationships and moments. Data includes hashtags associated with family, generations and memories. One hundred and fifty posts were collected which included public images and user-data, text, and comments. The researchers have identified some coding and ethical issues that have halted the project.
Publication outcome
July 2021 - July 2022
A special acknowledge goes to Conviction Politics: A Digital Investigation of the Convict Routes of Australian Democracy (2020-2023), a digital history project funded by Australian Research Council, led by A/Prof Tony Moore.
Being a Senior Project Coordinator of the Conviction Politics project has offered me invaluable insights into the history of Australian democracy through the convict history, Union movements, surveillance, collective resistance and their contemporary implications.
A multimedia hub of animations, documentaries, and data visualisation can be found here.
A travelling exhibition is coming up in 2024-2025, starting from Hobart, Australia to the UK and beyond. Watch this space.