About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). I completed my Ph.D. in Communication from Cornell University. I also hold an M.Phil. in Communication and a B.S.Sc. in Government and Public Administration from CUHK.

I am interested in how data-driven socio-technical systems are reconfiguring relations of power. I study how precarious workers, activists, and datafied citizens live with, feel about, navigate, and resist the systems that increasingly govern their working and public lives. I pay particular attention to people’s interpretive agency so as to understand how and why they find meaning and value in technology and negotiate the social relationships surrounding it. Theoretically, my scholarship has been informed by critical data studies, communication studies, and sociological perspectives on work, power, and collective action. Often using qualitative methods, I examine how emerging forms of technological governance are rationalized, enacted, and unevenly experienced across platforms, social domains, and geographic contexts. Broadly, my research addresses what it takes—and what it costs—for people to be seen, valued, and heard in datafied societies.

My writings have appeared in such journals as Big Data & Society, Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Social Movement Studies, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. I have also recently edited two journal special issues, one on infrastructural capitalism and data labor in/from China (co-edited with Jing Zeng and Ngai Pun) and another on the platformization of Chinese societies. I’m now working on my first book project that examines the moral economies of labor platforms in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I am currently an editorial board member of Big Data & Society and the book review editor of Convergence and the Chinese Journal of Communication.