Mediated Citizenship: online spoofs and peer production community on the Chinese internet

In this presentation, Dr Bingchun Meng will first lay out some of the theoretical debates as well as methodological challenges regarding the research of mediated citizenship. She will then draw upon my two recently completely projects, one on online spoofs and another on a peer production community on the Chinese Internet, to offer some empirical materials for reflecting on the issue of mediated citizenship. Dr Meng will conclude with a few thoughts on future research agenda.

Biography

Bingchun Meng is a Lecturer in the department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interests lie in communication governance and media production, both of which are examined in the context of globalization and technological shifts. There are three strands in this research: 1) What are the institutional responses to the challenges brought by new communication practices such as disturbance to political control and subversion of the conventional business model; what are some wider ramifications of such responses? 2) How have the institutional arrangements of media production changed in response to the local and global conditions and how the change affects the content being produced. 3) Media production at the grass-root level. How citizens exploit the opportunities afforded by digital technologies to expand their cultural and political participation, which, in different social contexts, may be constrained. These lines of research are connected by a general inquiry into the power dynamics operating at the macro- and micro-levels in communication networks.

Before joining LSE, Dr Bingchun Meng was a post-doc fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked at the Centre for Global Communication Studies and also taught courses on Chinese media. She obtained her PhD in Mass Communication from the Pennsylvania State University.

If you have any inquiry about CMC events, please contact Miao Mi at m.mi@my.westminster.ac.uk