Project Title

The Street Life of Making Social Intimacy

Research Topic

Meng-Yun's research examines entertainment live streaming as both an emergent livelihood for working youth and a prism for understanding how, within a socialist market economy, platform capitalism reorganises work, risk and hope in a late-industrial society. Drawing on long-term, multisensory ethnography, Meng-Yun follows grassroots rural-to-urban entertainers who make a living by livestreaming in public space; yet the focus is less a single setting than the wider logics through which structural forces convert classed feelings into aspirational projects, redistribute labour-market risk, and recast social recognition as algorithmic visibility. The project asks how working-class young people assemble precarious street–digital careers while negotiating aspiration, stigma and burnout, and seeks to understand the structures of feeling that link lived affect to political–economic and cultural arrangements. The study brings human stakes of working-class life into debates on digital labour, informality and social reproduction. Grounded in socialist market economy yet comparative in spirit, the study speaks to global conversations on platformisation and the moral economies of structural inequality, offering thick empirical materials and transferable concepts for understanding precarity beyond single region. Methodologically, the project advances media anthropology through online–offline, sensory ethnographic approaches that foreground bodies, atmospheres and felt infrastructures in the making of mediated livelihoods.

This project is funded by an ESRC DTP Studentship.

Biography

Meng-Yun graduated with a BA degree in Media Studies and Film Production and became a documentary filmmaker after completing her MFA degree in Film Studies and Visual Culture in East China Normal University. Later in her professional career, as an episode director, her documentary work Life Matters received Magnolia Award for Best Documentary Series in 2019 by the National Radio and Television Administration. Meng-Yun's documentary short film I want to find you, telling the life stories of the children born with Type 1 Diabetes, won Silver Award and Viewers’ Choice Award of Shanghai Citizens Micro Film Festival.

Supervisors

Professor Shani Orgad and Professor Bingchun Meng