Platform Visibility
Research Interest
My research treats visibility as a structural condition, not a personal achievement. Drawing on platform studies, I examine how algorithmic recommendation systems function as regimes of visibility — sorting content by race, gender, and nationality in ways that appear technical but are deeply political.
In my master's thesis on African-Chinese interracial family accounts on Douyin, I showed that different relational configurations — who stands in front of the camera, how labor is divided, how emotional warmth is performed — correlate with dramatically different levels of platform engagement. Visibility is not a reward for quality; it is a product of how well content fits a platform's structural logic.
Race & Gender Politics
Research Interest
My research takes an intersectional approach to understand how race, gender, nationality, and sexuality operate as interdependent axes of power — not separate variables — in shaping what becomes visible on platforms.
In Douyin's Utopian Brides (NCA 2025), I analyzed how Chinese female creators in transnational marriages reproduce and occasionally challenge Orientalist frameworks through narrative strategies — costume choices, camera positioning, voiceover language. The "ideal interracial marriage" is not a neutral representation; it is a racialized commodity shaped by audience expectation and algorithmic reward.
My PhD research extends this to compare four types of interracial pairings across Douyin and TikTok, asking how platform-specific logics differently value — and suppress — interracial intimacy depending on the racial and gender configuration of the couple.
Digital Self-Presentation
Research Interest
On short-video platforms, creators perform not only for audiences but also for recommendation algorithms, engagement metrics, and content moderation systems — infrastructures that reward certain forms of intimacy and penalize others.
In my master's thesis, I introduced relational configuration as an analytical unit — examining how role division, spatial arrangement, labor distribution, and interaction rhythm in interracial family videos form stable, recognizable patterns. These patterns are not free creative choices; they are shaped by what the platform has previously rewarded.
For migrant creators specifically, self-presentation involves a double negotiation: managing audience expectations rooted in racial and cultural stereotypes, while adapting to algorithmic logics that may amplify or marginalize their content based on factors invisible to them.
The Intimate Visibility Politics framework
Original framework · core of doctoral proposal
The Politics of Intimate Visibility is the theoretical framework I am developing across my PhD research. It operates on three levels.
Representation: Race is not a biological fact but a meaning system constructed through media practice. How an interracial couple is filmed, narrated, and edited constitutes — not merely reflects — racial meaning.
Intersectionality: No single axis explains visibility differentials across couple types. A Chinese woman with a white husband occupies a fundamentally different visibility position than a Chinese man with a Black woman — because race, gender, nationality, and sexuality interact.
Platform architecture: Algorithms are not passive pipes. They are active sorting mechanisms that amplify some intimate relationships and suppress others, reproducing the racial and national hierarchies that structure migration.
Together, these three levels explain why visibility in the intimate domain is never just personal — it is political.
From Scandalous Design to Praise Design
Original framework · accepted for conference
Bossetta (2020) showed how social media platforms design for scandal — shaping the flow of controversy to serve political and commercial ends. Praise Design is my conceptual response: what happens when the goal is not managing outrage, but engineering approval?
In Chinese social media platforms, positive propaganda is not imposed from above as censorship. It is embedded within the platform architecture itself — through visualized features (patriotic banners woven into entertainment interfaces), algorithmic delivery (state-aligned content prioritized in trending feeds), and gamified interaction (users earn rewards for engaging with national narratives).
This paper — accepted to the IAMCR 2025 Political Communication Division — argues that Praise Design is a novel propaganda mode: invisible, participatory, and structurally indistinguishable from entertainment. It offers a framework for understanding how any platform can be designed to produce emotional alignment with institutional power.
Structural Insight
By Design
I remember watching a story disappear. Not dramatically. No phone call from above, no editorial confrontation. Just a quiet edit, a subject line saying "let's hold this one," and then nothing. During my two years as a journalist in Shenzhen, I learned that censorship rarely announces itself. It arrives as a scheduling conflict, a word count problem, a suggestion to "keep it positive." The structure did its work, and the readers who never saw the story never noticed the absence.
That experience planted a question I haven't been able to put down: who decides what gets seen, and how do they make that decision feel inevitable?
I kept finding versions of the same thing. On social media, an algorithm decides which story gets amplified and which fades into silence. Not through explicit censorship, but through engagement metrics that nobody designed to be exclusionary, yet consistently are. An interface nudges you toward certain behaviors while making others feel awkward. A platform's reward system quietly shapes what kind of person you perform yourself to be. The design is always there. It just doesn't announce itself.
I think of this as a habit more than a skill. Not suspecting that someone is pulling strings, but asking: what is the architecture here, and what did the people who built it assume? Once that question gets in, it doesn't leave. I notice it reading the news, in meetings watching who gets interrupted, scrolling and feeling the pull toward certain kinds of content. The structure is doing something. It usually is.
Outsider Clarity
Outside In
Every place I've lived, I arrived as an outsider to something already underway. Rural Henan to a county boarding school. The countryside to Shenzhen. China to Sweden. Journalism to academia. Each time I assumed it was temporary, that I'd eventually catch up and just be from somewhere. I'm still waiting.
At some point I stopped treating this as a problem to fix. There's something you notice from the edge that you stop seeing once you're fully in. The assumptions a room runs on, which stories get told without anyone deciding to tell them, what counts as normal so obviously that nobody says it out loud. From slightly outside, those things stay visible a little longer. You catch them before they become furniture.
I didn't have a name for this until I read Park's concept of the "Marginal Man" in a sociology class. Someone who lives at the boundary of two worlds and belongs completely to neither. It landed harder than I expected. Not because it was flattering, but because it was accurate. And it suggested something I hadn't considered: that the position had a logic to it, a particular kind of sight that came with the discomfort.
Outsider clarity isn't about being detached or above it all. It's not the romanticized exile who suffers and therefore sees. It's quieter than that. Just the habit of staying with a question one beat longer than everyone else: whose assumptions are running this room? Usually the question leads somewhere. Sometimes it's the whole point.
Human-Scale Empathy
One at a Time
It was a typhoon night in Shenzhen. I got a call around midnight and grabbed my camera. Migrant workers with nowhere to go were sheltering in temporary construction site shacks, and I was sent to cover it. When I arrived, the rain was coming down hard. Standing on wet ground outside one of the shacks, I met a man from Sichuan. He said: "I never want to trouble anyone. All I need is a corner to sleep in."
What stayed with me wasn't the quote. It was the way he held his body. Shoulders drawn in, back slightly curved, taking up as little space as possible. As if existing itself required an apology.
That posture told me something about his life in the city that no statistic about migrant labor could. Numbers tell you how many people are in a situation. They don't tell you what it does to the body to be in it.
Years later, doing research on short videos made by African women living in rural China, I came across a video where a woman marked eight years of her life, from twenty to twenty-eight, using the lyrics of a Chinese pop song. One character at a time. It took me a while to understand what I was watching. Eight years in another country, in a language she had learned from scratch, condensed into a song that Chinese audiences would recognize immediately, and that she had made entirely her own. I could have coded it as "cultural adaptation." I filed it differently.
Human-scale empathy, to me, is just insisting on that. Not sentiment, not softness. The discipline of not letting abstraction do too much work. The man from Sichuan didn't represent a social phenomenon. He was a person who needed a corner to sleep in. Both things were true. The second one mattered more.
Era Fluency
The Machine Age
I don't come at technology as an engineer. I can't build the things I find interesting, and I'm not trying to. What I do is read about them the way some people read history: looking for the logic underneath, the human decisions that got encoded into systems, the story of why this and not something else.
Every era has a machine that reorganizes how people think, work, and relate to each other. The printing press didn't just make books cheaper. It changed who got to have an authoritative voice and on what terms. The smartphone didn't just make communication faster. It restructured attention, intimacy, and what counts as being present. These aren't neutral upgrades. They carry assumptions. They create new defaults. Most people adapt without quite noticing the adaptation.
I got interested in this during my journalism years, watching how social media platforms were changing what a story could be. Not just the format. The logic of what was worth telling, who was worth listening to, what counted as evidence. The algorithm wasn't just a distribution tool. It was an editor with very specific tastes and no self-awareness about them.
That's what draws me to the current moment. AI is doing something similar, and I want to understand it before everyone stops noticing the shift. Not the technical specifications, but the questions underneath: what does it change about authorship, about expertise, about what it means to make something? Every era gets the machines it can imagine. The more interesting question is always what the machines imagine back.
