Longxuan is a Visiting Research Student in Social Research Methods supervised by Audrey Alejandro, and he is now a third-year PhD candidate in Sociology supervised by Wei Wei at East China Normal University.
Prior to that, Longxuan received his B.A. in Journalism from Renmin University of China and his M.Sc. in Gender, Media and Culture from the London School of Economics and Political Science; he also undertook an exchange program at the Department of Communication Studies at Chung Cheng University in Taiwan.
Longxuan’s research focuses on gay men’s media practices in digital platforms and explores the interaction between the two based on a human-environmental perspective. His papers have revealed how gay men in China are appropriating space for empowerment in a constrained environment, while describing the interactions that have emerged within them that differ from traditional scripts in the field of interpersonal communication.
Longxuan’s doctoral thesis project will take a multi-methods approach – including algorithmic ethnography, walkthrough method, semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, and thematic analysis – to explore the relationship between algorithmic technologies and Chinese gay men.