Dr Jiali Fan (2026)

  • Research Affiliate
Dr Jiali Fan (2026)

Contact

About

Jiali is a research affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge. She holds a BA with First Class Honours in Media and Communications from Monash University and an MPhil in the Sociology of Media and Culture from the University of Cambridge.  She completed her PhD thesis, In and Against the Platform: A Comparative Study of Women Food Influencers on Instagram and Xiaohongshu, with the department.

Her research interests include digital culture, feminist studies, influencer industries, and the platform economy.

Her PhD project focused on women influencers on Instagram and Xiaohongshu, examining the hopes, frustrations, strategies, and forms of resistance that emerge within specific social, cultural, political, and technological contexts. She articulates three levels of gendered precariousness—motherhood, work, and body politics—and examines how women influencers challenge neoliberal gendered structures through their work, while also consolidating the very neoliberal regimes they are struggling against. This dynamic creates a unique dual positionality, where influencers exercise agency by being both 'in' and 'against' these systems. In addition to her work on digital labour, Jiali has also explored gendered migration patterns in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

Supervisor

Professor Christel Lane

 

Affiliation Dates

17/01/2026 - 17/01/2027

 

Research

Research interests

  • Digital Media
  • Platform economy
  • Creator industries
  • Labour
  • Post-work
  • Feminist Studies
  • Body politics
  • Gendered mobility
  • Qualitative Methodologies

Research Projects

Resistance for a Wage? “Lying Flat” Influencers in the Platform Economy.

Precarity Re-imagined: Re-territorialising Platform-mediated Work.

The “Eastern Gaze”: Researching the West as Asian Female Researchers.

 

Research Groups and Affiliations

Technology & New Media Research Cluster, Cambridge University of Cambridge Individual in the Labour Market Research Group

 

Publications

Journal Articles

  • Fan, J., 2024. The ‘Emotional Contract’: on Obligation and Guilt in Women Influencers’ Work with Brands. Feminist Media Studies, pp.1-17.
  • Fan, J., 2024. In and Against the Platform: Navigating Precarity for Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Red) Influencers. New Media & Society, 0(0).
  • Fan, J. and Kanai, A., 2022. ‘I Can Live Without You’: Self-Branding as Individuation in Young Chinese Women’s Transnational Mobilities. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 26 (5), pp.661-679.
  • Dwyer, T., Kanai, A., Pfefferkorn, J., Fan, J. and Lambert, A., 2021. Media Comforts and International Student Mobility: Managing Hopes, Host and Home. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 42(4), pp.406-422. 

 

Media Articles

Teaching and supervision

  • Soc 7: Media, Culture and Society.