About
Project Title
'Diving deep’ into dynamic networks and emergent publics of covid-19 conspiracy theories: informational ecologies of quasi-knowledge-production and institutional capture
Research Topic
Focusing on the pandemic as a moment when the global information order faltered, Zichen (Jess)’s project examines how conspiratorial narratives on biotechnologies (ie. vaccine) travel, mutate, and institutionalise across diverse digital environments, from message boards like 4chan and 8kun to forums such as Reddit, and into mainstream discursive spaces. It traces how narratives originating from the fringes reappropriate and are selectively captured and repurposed by mainstream and institutional media, forming a transnational circulation chain of discourse that serves right-wing mobilisation. While the corpus, drawn primarily from English-language OSINT archives, appears centred on US–UK online ecosystems, the research situates these narratives within a broader transnational information circuit. It traces how “Western” conspiratorial discourses—originating in Anglo-American contexts—intersect with and invoke geopolitical “others” such as Russia and China, revealing how narratives of blame, infiltration, and ideological warfare circulate virally across linguistic and national boundaries. In doing so, it reconstructs a cross-platform and cross-national chain of mobilisation through which crisis-driven conspiracy imaginaries gain traction and legitimacy. Using network analysis, NLP tools, and a combination of computational and qualitative methods applied to archival OSINT repositories, this study unpacks the mobilisation process of conspiratorial narratives and reveals the worryingly fluid boundaries that define expert knowledge and conscientious civic participation. Rather than treating conspiracy theories as aberrant or platform-specific phenomena, the thesis understands them as historically layered manifestations of modern governance struggles—where competing epistemic logics of freedom and control, transparency and secrecy, are constantly negotiated across a fragmented and partially moderated communicative landscape. The project maps the fractured, fluctuating cross-site associations, focusing on the evolving alignments and formation of (e.g., semi-expert) coalitions and their performances that aim to establish new epistemic authorities and the way they strategically navigate the affordances of the "platforms for free speech" for expanding their network and influence. Exploring these network structural configurations enables Zichen (Jess) to articulate the platforms’ affordances of crowdsourcing evidence for making and amplifying conspiracy theories, which create "path dependencies" (Peters, 2015, p. 33) for political interactions and lend momentum to the emergence of (counter) publics associated with, yet more complex than, populism. Jess's project takes the networks as "microphysics of power" (Foucault, 1979) and a roadmap for unpacking the contestability of power shown in the evolving transnational conspiracy theory networks and evolving narratives of the conceived power relations amongst scientific R&D institutions, policy making authorities and the wider public. This leads to the analysis of such dynamic networks and discursive boundary work that brings in the genealogy of power struggles amongst the above stakeholders. Particularly, Jess is analysing the power struggles over the credibility and trustworthiness of knowledge production about not only bioscience on immunology; but also, its ethical parameters comprised of free (or careless/hate/irresponsible) speech, transmissible risks versus liberal imaginaries of body sovereignty, (anti)globalisation (transnational pharmaceutical corporates’ role in global development), and international (dis)order (vaccine diplomacy, etc.).
Biography
Zichen (Jess) dedicates to studying the crisis of epistemic trust observed in conspiratorial publics to the structural contradictions of infrastructural governance under conditions of global turbulence—where liberalism’s internal erosion, the revival of Cold War imaginaries, and China–US techno-industrial rivalries fracture the very universality of truth, transparency, and openness once promised by the Internet. Through this comparative and genealogical lens, her work reveals how both conspiracy discourse and digital infrastructures operate as sites of moral imagination and geopolitical negotiation in the post-liberal order. For example, in her article Mapping Discursive Regimes of Transnational Dynamics of Conspiracy Theories as an Emergent Process, she proposes a processual and reflexive framework for studying how conspiracy theories circulate across linguistic, national, and platform boundaries, and how networked co-creation of conspiratorial narratives mirrors the wider disintegration of a shared epistemic order, where truth-making becomes contingent on transnational ideological alignments.
Another article Paradoxical Infrastructuring: Genealogies of Governance and the “Art of Being Governed” in China’s Blockchain–AI Hypes extends this concern with epistemic authority to the governance of emerging technologies. It unpacks how decentralisation, once framed as a libertarian imaginary of freedom and transparency, has been reabsorbed into state-centric infrastructures of legitimacy and innovation. Through a Foucauldian and postcolonial genealogy, it argues that ideological contradiction, between decentralisation and control, autonomy and dependence, functions not as failure but as a generative mechanism of governance. At present, she serves as a researcher at Oxford Global Society (OXGS), collaborating with academic and industry experts to produce policy reports on AI geopolitics and digital governance. Her contributions to OXGS (see publications) reflect her sustained commitment to understanding how emerging technologies reconfigure international power, accountability, and civic futures. She is also a research associate at Digital Futures for Children (DFC), where she works on children’s rights in the digital environment, rethinking civic participation and data ethics under platform capitalism. Beyond her journal publications, her blog essays for the LSE EUROPP Blog and LSE Media Blog bring her academic reflections to wider audiences on topics ranging from the transnational flow of conspiracy theories to reframing research on children’s rights in the digital environment. Her collaborative policy writings for OXGS extend these insights into applied governance debates, foregrounding ethical dilemma and global asymmetries in AI policymaking.
In terms of editing, reviewing and admin work for publishing houses, Zichen (Jess) is the editor of the Special Issue “Technology and Governance in the Age of Web 3.0” for Politics and Governance (Cogitatio Press). Zichen’s scholarly profile has been recognised through invitations to review for major journals, including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature Springer), The Communication Review (Taylor&Francis) where she evaluates work on network analysis (spatial distribution and associated spatial regression distribution analysis), various digital methods for corpus linguistic analysis, and topics of hate speech in the context of ultra-nationalism, populism, and anti-feminism. She has also reviewed for conferences on digital platform and infrastructure studies.
Alongside her academic research, Zichen (Jess) is also a commissioned columnist for Tencent International News (Beijing) and Phoenix International News (Beijing & Hong Kong), where she writes on US–UK politics, transatlantic relations, Silicon Valley’s political–industrial complex, and the evolving dynamics of China–US–UK trade and technology relations. Her bilingual public commentary reflects her commitment to bridging academic insights with public understanding, offering critical, transnational perspectives on how digital and geopolitical transformations are reshaping democratic discourse, media power, and international cooperation.
In addition, she has been invited for guest lectures at UCL’s Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) and Shenzhen University’s Digital Media and Social Development, and she has engaged broader audiences through podcasts, reflecting her reflexive engagement with British academic landscapes and the geopolitics underpinning knowledge production. Her earlier training grounds her current work in a strong interdisciplinary foundation.
Zichen obtained her MSc in Politics and Communication (Distinction) from LSE in 2022, where her dissertation, Big Brother Watch’s Campaign Against COVID Pass and Its Implications for Science Communication (supervised by Claire Milne), analysed civic contestation over health surveillance and the ethical parameters of science communication under digital capitalism. In this project, she uses Social Network Analysis to provide empirical evidence of political publics that resonate with such a tension in citizenship and urge to have a consequential dialogue with new knowledge in science seeking to have it verified and proved within ethical parameters in order to reestablish trust under (authoritarian) capitalism, where there are competing imperatives (ie profit, political stability). The pursuit of understanding what counts as, and who are eligible to define "literate and conscientious public" in highly mediated media environment sustained throughout her master’s study with other empirical studies across different national and historical contexts (UK, US, China, and Russia).
In 2021, Zichen (Jess) completed a BA (Hons) degree in International Communications with Spanish (First Class Honours) from University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She was trained on philosophy of technology, STS, critical theories, and cultural studies, and awarded multiple scholarships during her bachelor’s study from the university, provincial government, and China’s National Council. During her undergrad exchange at the University of Warwick, Zichen (Jess) studied political science and sociology, she formed a Sino-West comparative insights of global populist orientation that gives rise to challenges to rationalised systems of knowledge and specialist expertise, particularly evident during the pandemic when the efforts in science communications were ethically and practically challenging.
Supervisors
Dr Nick Anstead and Professor Shakuntala Banaji
Expertise
Political communication; Challenges to science/health communications and knowledge production; Digital technologies and governance; Political theory; Network analysis; STS