Dr Jiali Fan

Overview

Dr Jiali Fan is a Lecturer in Media at City St George’s, University of London. Her research focuses on influencer industries and digital media cultures across Western and Chinese platforms, with particular interests in gender, labour and resistance.   With a comparative focus, Jiali examines how individuals navigate platform economies across different social, cultural and political contexts. Her previous research on women influencers on Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Red) explores gendered precarity, emotional work in commercial relationships, creative autonomy and everyday resistance. Her current research also examines “lying flat” cultures on Chinese social media and the ways individuals sustain forms of everyday resistance within platform economies. Her work has been published in journals including New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her academic expertise is also informed by professional experience across a range of cultural, commercial and political settings, including galleries, advertising companies and, more recently, political campaign management.   Jiali also contributes to public and media discussions on digital platforms, influencer culture and social media. She was interviewed by media outlets including The Guardian and Trouw, and she has contributed to documentary projects The Asian Guilt Code - Rewiring Emotions, exploring digital cultures in Asia.   Alongside this work, Jiali is interested in questions of knowledge production, positionality and counter-research. She is a co-founder of CRIMSON, an interdisciplinary research collective that explores different forms of counter-research in global media and communication studies, particularly in the context of rising populism and intensifying challenges to critical theories and DEI initiatives.   Prior to joining City St George’s, Jiali was a supervisor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, where she taught media and culture, platform economies, the sociology of work and global capitalism.  

 

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2021 - 2025
• MPhil, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2019 - 2020
• BA (First class honours), Monash University, Australia, 2015 - 2019

Employment

• Supervisor, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, January 2023 - present

Publications by category