In the past, women had been inclined to remain silent in the face of sexual harassment and this article examines the case of Chinese women, who have been empowered by the global #MeToo movement to fight for social equality. Through interviews and observations, this study analyzes how this movement has empowered Chinese women both at individual and collective levels and motivated them to fight against sexual harassment. However, further challenges remain, such as reforming of outdated laws. Therefore, the study suggests an institutional level approach for the empowerment of Chinese women and aims to draw more attention to similar strategies for the empowerment of women in non-western contexts.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly important for people with disabilities (PWDs), suggesting digital inclusion as a possible social mechanism against the social exclusion of disability. This study suggests a more complicated relationship between ICTs and disability. Situated in a Chinese context and based on research methods of ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study explains why and how social exclusion of disability in China leads to PWDs’ exodus to the Internet, where they find a possible habitat of digital and social inclusion notwithstanding the risk of more profound social exclusion. The study finally argues that the Internet habitat of PWDs is both a material enclave and a discourse heterotopia for understanding Chinese society, disability, and ICTs. In addition, future studies should further include PWDs in this field.
7 September 2018 in Information, Communication & Society
Situated in China’s neoliberal context and its rapid development of information communication technologies (ICTs), this study aimed to examine how disabled people in China transformed themselves into new self-enterprising subjects in the wave of ‘Internet + Disability.’ In order to answer this question, this study tried to develop an analytical framework to illustrate the disability practices that situated in the ICTs and neoliberal context, underpinned by the discourse of ‘self as enterprise,’ and demonstrated by the practices of entrepreneurship and employment. Based on the research design of case studies and methods that included ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study explained how a disabled entrepreneur, Mr. Yuan, took advantage of the wave of ‘Internet + Disability’ to realize his dream of entrepreneurship and face the uncertainties of a precarious entrepreneurship. It also explained how Mr. Yuan’s employees achieved their dreams of employment but suffered the precariousness of enterprising subjects.
In contrast to the previous scholarly focus on anti-discrimination, which has long been described as a salient topic in the disability research area, this article discusses evidence to conclude that disabled people in China are inclined to deny social discrimination instead of finding ways to fight for social inclusion. Through interviews and observations, this article generalizes five types of causes – institutional causes, environmental causes, societal causes, familial causes and psychological causes – to explain an ‘observed phenomenon’ of discrimination denial in China. The authors worry that the phenomenon of discrimination denial might represent an even deeper type of discrimination, which might severely hinder the inclusion of disabled people into the mainstream. It is hoped that scholars may pay more attention to the intricate nature and fundamental paradox related to disability discrimination in non-western societies.
This study examines the role of disabled women in the #MeToo movement by analyzing their voices in the movement. Through online participatory observation, we discovered that the movement has individually empowered disabled women on three levels: as women, as disabled people, and as resisters. These disabled women described two ways in which they were empowered at each level, a total of six ways: they realized that they were not guilty, not ashamed, not stereotyped, not going to tolerate abuse, awakened, and united. However, the empowerment of the #MeToo movement only works at an individual level for some disabled women with higher economic and social status through online platforms, with few offline actions being taken and few responses from society to their appeals. There is thus still a long way for disabled women to go in order to be fully included in society.
8 October 2018 in International Communication Gazette
Guided by the perspective of media framing theory and a newly proposed multi-proximity model, we analysed the content of news reports on five major terrorist attacks from four international news media. We identified three frame packages, each with four functional frames suggested by Entman. Regression analysis revealed the differential impact on media frames of multiple proximities in ideology, religion and bilateral relations. When the media host country and victim country are bound by close relations, the news frames applied to such attacks will be more negative. The same is true for religious proximity between the media host country and victim country. In contrast, close religious proximity between the media host country and the attacker group will lead to the adoption of a less negative news frame for an attack. Interestingly, the proximity of ideology between the media host country and victim country did not show the expected explanatory power for the media frames.