About

I am a first-year PhD student in Creative Industries. I hold a master’s degree (with Distinction) in International Cultural Policy and Management from our centre and a bachelor’s degree in New Media Study from Communication University of Zhejiang, China. I was an exchange student at Shih Hsin University in Taiwan in my sophomore year. During that period, I volunteered to set up and run a community newspaper for the Da’an District, Taipei City. Before I came to Warwick, I worked temporarily as a journalist for China Central Television. My documentary on Chinese self-media entrepreneurs won the Best Short Documentary in the 1st ‘Mainland China - Taiwan Short Film Competition’ in 2020. The engagement with online audiovisual creators also inspired me to give in-depth research on platform-based creative labour in my PhD.

Research Interests

Creative work could be autonomous but precarious, self-fulfilling but self-exploitative. With the proliferation of UGC (User Generated Content) platforms, the new 'producing by users' model brings further uncertainties to creative work. Although online creators are often referred to as 'users' or 'amateurs', self-media entrepreneurs have become the crucial source of traffic and attention for digital platforms. 'Contract labour' has thus been replaced by 'platform labour', implying a more neoliberal and zero-liability model that leverages algorithms to optimise labour's flexibility, scalability, tractability, and fragmentation.

Drawing perspectives from 'platform' and 'creative labour' studies, this project will investigate the lived experience of platform-based self-media entrepreneurs through ethnographic approaches. The innovation of this project lies in bringing online creative work to the scrutiny of Pierre Bourdieu's 'field analysis'. This project will identify the challenges faced in the creative labour market and demonstrate the new characteristics of 'creative labour' and 'production relations' brought about by platforms, especially on how platforms act as employers through new and more complex forms of control mediated by ICTs, and how the 'habitus' of self-employed entrepreneurs are thus nurtured through negotiation, contestation, and compromise with various forces along the platform logic. It also allows for further reflection on the far-reaching socio-political implications co-facilitated by the new digitalised creative work, the pattern of ‘platform capitalism’ and the valorisation of ‘creativity’ within contemporary policy discourse.

My project is supervised by Dr Chris Bilton and Dr Heidi Ashton.