Biography
Jane Yeahin Pyo is an Assistant Professor at the Communication Department of Tulane University. Her research interests include digital politics, global technology and digital platforms, and democracy, with a particular focus on how digital media technologies reshape our social and democratic life, focusing on civic politics and journalism. Her research brings critical and global perspectives to how digital media technologies impact and shape our democratic and social life.
Project summary
This project examines the role of global digital media technologies in shaping the diasporic identities of Asian Americans. I draw on the framework of ports as transnational contact zones where the local meets the global, but also where tensions and frictions occur in the process of the encounter. Inspired by this framework, I theorize global digital platforms as “technological ports” where transnational cultural flows meet the lived experiences of diasporic users, whose everyday experiences are rooted in their status as marginalized racialized ethnic minorities in the U.S. By paying particular attention to Asian-centered digital platforms, such as WeChat and KakaoTalk, this project examines the ways in which their diasporic identities are made, negotiated, and contested through these platforms. I explore how Asian Americans navigate the conflicting demands of a sense of belonging, which are simultaneously mitigated and amplified by the cultural implications of these platforms. While non-Western, Asian platforms are disregarded as local platforms with limited global influence, this research challenges the prevailing Western hegemony and calls for a reconsideration of the local-global conjunction from the perspectives of diasporic Asian Americans and their uses of Asian platforms.
