ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2703-2427
Current Organisation
Deakin University
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Publisher: Intellect
Date: 10-2017
Abstract: This article considers the changing nature of international students’ lived experiences of disadvantage in Australia in the context of their daily practices of social media. Specifically, it first engages with the extant empirical research on social media practices in the migration context which points to the contingent impacts of digital technologies on migrants’ everyday lives. This body of literature suggests the possibility to probe into the lived experiences of migrants and their everyday strategies through a close examination of their activities around social media. Further, this article attends to studies in the Australian international student literature which highlights the interplays of digital technologies and international student agency. An analysis of the studies suggests how the students’ struggles with social exclusion are entangled with their everyday social media practices in a variety of ways. At the same time, the complex roles of social media problematize how we understand international students’ experiences in the host nation and how we could re-conceptualize ‘social exclusion’ and ‘social inclusion’. For that reason, this article calls for more nuanced approaches towards understanding international students’ lived experiences through the multiple ways international students integrate digital media technologies like social media into their everyday lives. Methodologically, digital ethnographic methods are discussed to facilitate such approaches in innovatively revealing the subtlety of international student mobilities and lived experiences in host societies.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.1177/20563051231157590
Abstract: This article takes the “Fox Eye” challenge that trended on social media in 2020 as a case study in anti-racism activism by (East) Asian users on TikTok. The “Fox Eye” challenge was a trend in which both celebrities and ordinary users—often predominantly White women—posted photos and short videos on how to wear specific styles of make-up to achieve almond-shaped eyes or “fox eyes.” This was often accompanied with a “migraine pose” where a user pushes their index and middle fingers up against the temples on both sides of their head to “lift” the corners of their upper eyelids, and was colloquially referred to as a “Chinese” or “oriental” look. In response, (East) Asian users on TikTok called out the historically racist undertones of this seemingly superficial trend, using the features and affordances of the platform to produce everyday, nonheroic forms of digital activism, as an act of civic engagement and activist c aigning. Building on the scholarship on digital activism, we consider how TikTok has emerged as an alternative activist space for young people, specifically as it services users as a video production and sharing app. We specifically focus on the audiovisual aesthetics of the TikTok narratives in the counter-Fox Eye trend c aign, wherein the strategic and templatable deployments of vernacular TikTok aesthetics—curated image selections, creative uses of sound and audio memes, specific renders of visual filters and effects—play a central role in giving meaning to the online activist narratives created. This has given rise to platformed activism in the TikTok vernacular that we term “gesticular activism,” which focuses on the generation of visibility and virality as awareness-building and consciousness-raising tactics.
Publisher: Springer Nature Singapore
Date: 2019
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 12-2022
DOI: 10.1386/TJTM_00048_5
Abstract: Review of: Digital Experiences of International Students: Challenging Assumptions and Rethinking Engagement , Shanton Chang and Catherine Gomes (eds) (2021) Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 228 pp., ISBN 978-0-36722-635-0, p/bk, £34.99
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-11-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-04-2019
Abstract: This article investigates Chinese international students’ everyday transnational family practices through the use of social media. Specifically, the article highlights the relevance of two interlinked forms of disconnection in these students’ daily negotiations of ambivalent cross-border family relations in an age of always-on connectivity. The first form involves their disconnection from the general public via their creation of intimate spaces on social media that are exclusive to their family members. The second form involves the students detaching themselves from such intimate spaces, often temporarily, to escape and resist familial control and surveillance. I conclude the article by developing the notion of ‘disconnective intimacy’ to conceptualise contemporary Chinese transnational families. This article contributes to the literature on the transnational family by providing an insight into the micro-politics of mediated co-presence through the trope of ‘disconnective practice’.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-02-2021
Abstract: Since its formal inception in the 1970s, Australian (ethno-) ‘multiculturalism’ has been a source of debate over the nation’s imagined trajectory. This internal or national discourse has, inter alia, critiqued the unchanging racialised power relations between groups, where ethnocultural plurality becomes subsumed under a predominant White governmentality. In this article, however, we consider a particular difficulty in sustaining a ‘truly’ multicultural narrative of contemporary Australian society from an extra-national perspective. To do so, we draw from in-depth interviews with 28 Chinese international students (CIS) in Australia to examine how a White Australia is constructed and normalised from outside the state. We utilise these perspectives to argue for the importance of considering extra-national factors in maintaining this racialised imaginary of Australia as a White nation. This argument also foregrounds the challenge of Australia’s neoliberal multiculturalism project in capitalising on a normative multiculturalism on the international stage, highlighting an extra-national difficulty to fully commit to a multicultural re-imagining of the nation that is orced from a racialist narrative. This further presents a conundrum for the Australian state racialised as White. That is, the need to relinquish a White face to engender better social cohesion amongst its ethnoculturally erse populations paradoxically exists in tandem with the need to maintain a White face for the attraction of more ersity, at least for economic benefits in this globalised, neoliberal era.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-06-2021
Abstract: Daigou, literally translated as buying on behalf of, is a Mandarin term that refers to a form of personalised transnational trading activity, which is generally characterised by practices of purchasing locally manufactured products overseas and reselling them to consumers in China via international courier services. This article examines Chinese international students’ digital labour invested in daigou and their use of social media, particularly WeChat, in running their personal enterprises. Through the analytical lens of ‘boundary’, the article reveals how daigou activities involve sustained crossing and reconstructing boundaries of privacy through selective self-disclosure of personal information. This study contributes to the empirical literature on international students’ everyday use of digital media by highlighting their work practices in the digital age. Conceptually, the case study of daigou suggests overlapping spaces between various forms of digital labour and the relevance of ‘unproductive’ labour which constitutes a necessary dimension of online work.
No related grants have been discovered for Xinyu Zhao.