INAUGURAL LECTURE: 🗣️ Start or end of life? Advancing the Sociology of Life, Death & Bereavement - Kate Reed 📅4-5pm Tues 29 Oct 2025 📌In person (University of Manchester) or online 🎟️Free, register via Eventbrite www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/start-or-e...

Folks, please check out Liang's new mini documentary with the ARD German Media: In Love with An AI youtu.be/tIgXRkEPlZ8?...

It’s a very pleasant experience to work with Marie von Mallinckrodt and her team from ARD Germany on this mini-documentary project: In love with an AI 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳! Plz check it out here: www.ardmediathek.de/video/weltsp...

Yay! Another output from our Posthuman digital intimacies project!!! This is our Women and Video Games block! Plz do check it out!

Why is intuition is a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures? 🤖✨👾 A key output for the @britishacademy.bsky.social 'Speculative Machines and Us' project! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

What happens when we centre ‘Asias’ in queer critique? The Queer Asia as Method editorial introduces a powerful framework to decolonise queer studies. #OnlineFirst @liangge11.bsky.social @jdanielluther.bsky.social @evacyli.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We argue for examining how media technologies and transnational cultural flows across diverse Asian contexts shape, circulate and contest queernesses and Asian-nesses, offering rich ground for epistemological and methodological innovation❤️

❤️Our Queer Asia as Method framework challenges the Euro-American dominance often found within queer studies by centring the intricate, fluid intersections of ‘queernesses’ and ‘Asias’

✨New Pub Day! Since our Queer Asia as Method roundtable in 2021, our special issue Queer Asia as Method has now been published online first by Media Culture & Society! Our editorial piece is here: doi.org/10.1177/0163...

I have been interviewed by BBC News concerning the recent Haitang Incident: after last year’s detention of over 50 women danmei writers who produce explicit male-male romances and erotica in China, more women writers have been summoned this spring for www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

New job vacancy at TCRU! For a Lecturer (Teaching) in Social Psychology - 2.5 year post (www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...). Please share widely! @sriucl.bsky.social @ioe.bsky.social @bps-social-psych.bsky.social

🎉 Announcing a new #ArtsBasedResearch toolkit! Co-created by researchers @ucl.ac.uk & Wits University, it explores how creativity & the arts empower underserved communities. A practical guide for researchers & practitioners. 📅 Coming 26 Jun. @humeraiqbal.bsky.social @uclpophealthsci.bsky.social

And @liangge11.bsky.social (@tcru-ucl.bsky.social) discussed the pressures facing danmei culture in China as it faces censorship and other challenges ⬇️ journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Radio Free Asia today on the #海棠文化 #Haiting arrests of mostly female #danmei authors, confirming what was shared on Weibo; also alleging the sweep was cross-province. Unlike the 2024 ≈50 arrests in Anhui, these weren't about profit but amount of traffic/number of clicks: www.rfa.org/mandarin/she...

(if you want to know more about the 2024 arrests, the rather brilliant scholar @liangge11.bsky.social, who teaches at UCL, published an article in March in EJCS: "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry"—it's open access and they are VERY astute) doi.org/10.1177/1367...

Exploring digital intimacies across cultures!The Transcultural Digital Intimacies Research Network(TransDI)critically examines how technologies (AI, platforms, games, embodied technologies etc.) reshapes relationships, blurring online/offline lives and human/non-human connections! #DigitalIntimacies

✨Post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities denote women's recognition of and response to the gendered culture and regulations of heteropatriarchy in post-socialist China and transnational post-feminism.... 3/3

✨I propose the novel concept of ‘post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities’, which is embodied in the experiences of the one-child generation of Chinese urban young women who live as ambivalent desiring subjects. 2/3

✨I am so pleased to share that my article has been published in Feminist Theory today! This is the first piece for my exploration concerning China as Theory Generator and Danmei as a rich site for epistemic and methodological innovations. Check out here⬇️ doi.org/10.1177/1464...

Drawing on 9-month autoethnographic engagement with the AI companion XingYe, we explore the very gamification of intimacy – a design paradigm that commodifies emotional labour by rendering affection efficient, quantifiable and achievement-oriented. @TransDINetwork

🥳🥳🥳I am extremely happy to share that our first research output on AI chatbot and gamifying digital intimacy, from our Posthuman Digital Intimacies project has now been published by Media Culture & Society! Please do check out here: doi.org/10.1177/0163...

•Feminisation of labor• understood here as a constant process of invisibility and vulnerability. Within the Chinese audio drama industry, female workers are stuck in invisibility, frequently find themselves relegated to backstage roles, and subject to an inflexible flexibility

✨In this 🆕 article, I examine the struggling lived experiences of women workers in the Chinese audio drama industry, and I reveal a pronounced process – the feminization of labor – within this burgeoning creative sector journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

In "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry", Liang Ge explores the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Read it here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Open Access UCL Research: Liuli and the Soul-Spirit-Body Organism: The Fluid Body Imagination in the Dialogue between Posthuman Theory and the Concept of Soul and Flesh in Pre-Qin China // 《琉璃》与心魂 - 元神 - 肉身有机体： 后人类理论与中国先秦灵肉观对话中流动的身体想象 discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...

Prof Ann Oakley and Dr Charlotte Faircloth from TCRU were featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Friday talking about their new project! Check it out from 42 minutes in here! 🥳🥳🥳 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

#MyNameIsNotAsylumSeeker Pop-up Exhibition at The Bartlett until Thu 15 May! To read about the exhibition and the research: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2024/05/... solidarities.net/my-name-is-n...

🆕I would like to share my new article about the 2024 Haitang incident...I critically interrogate the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through ugliness – not as a state-imposed stigma but as a critical lens and a generative conceptual tool: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Hola Friends! Please save the date of Thursday 3 April, if you are around Cardiff, for our Fandom and Home Roundtable!🥳🥳🥳 I will share my coming research article on Digital Nomadic Subjects and Chinese Fanfiction Cultures😊😊😊

✨ Soft & romanticized queer expressions as a survival strategy? Moreover, we suggest that, in China’s socio-cultural & media landscape, subtle, romanticized expressions of queerness function as both a means of survival & a reticent/han-xu challenge to heteronormativity.

We reveal how their chugui (the localised term of coming out in China) was framed as a dual threat to both national honor & patriarchal norms, exacerbated by online misogyny & homophobia.

🌈🌟✨In this new article, We analyse public reactions to two Chinese female athletes who publicly affirm their queer identity in 2021, sparking national debate doi.org/10.1016/j.ws...

We're making a starter pack! Where my SRI peeps at? go.bsky.app/BcLmmBN

Association of Narrative Research and Practice & TCRU, UCL Seminars Jorge Daniel Vásquez, American University Narratives of Gender and Erasure in the Sociology of the Color Line: The Case of Irene Diggs Tuesday March 4th, 2024: 5-6.30pm (UK time) Register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/narratives...

#TCRUSeminarSeries Today, Prof Jenny Woodman explained the structures and activities that NIHR Children and Families Policy Research Unit (CPRU) has in place to work with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) (including their Responsive Facility) and how these work in practice.

Open Access UCL Research: Ambivalent Affective Labour, Datafication of Qing and Danmei Writers in the Cultural Industry discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...

Hello Bluesky 👋 We are Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU), part of Social Research Institute, UCL IOE. Follow us for our research and engagement updates: We have been leaders of research into children, parenting and families since 1973. www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departme...

TODAY AT 18:00: @liangge11.bsky.social (Thomas Coram Research Unit) chairs the launch of "Queer Literature in the Sinosphere". A panel of four researchers will discuss their contributions to this examination of queer Chinese literature. www.kcl.ac.uk/events/queer...

Open Access UCL Research: Dual ambivalence: The Untamed Girls as a counterpublic discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...

Open Access UCL Research: Masculinity in crisis? Reticent / han-xu politics against danmei and male effeminacy discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...

Open Access UCL Research: Ambivalent affective labor: The datafication of qing and danmei writers in the cultural industry discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...