Project Title 

Reporting Dystopia: Techno-Orientalism and Speculative Fiction in Representations of China in Journalism

Research Topic 

Hatty's project examines the techno-orientalist production of contemporary China in mainstream international journalism. She will take an intertextual approach that traces the ways in which signs, discourses, and narrative models from speculative fiction are recontextualized in journalistic representation of issues ranging from surveillance to 5G to China’s response to Covid-19. She will look at how textual references and narrative strategies from fiction, in addition to reported facts, are used rhetorically to produce techno-orientalist discourses in journalism, and at how intertextuality shapes the ideological and moral positioning of the text.

Hatty's project is supported by an LSE Studentship.

Biography

Hatty is an award-winning journalist with more than eight years of experience in feature-writing, editing, and audio and visual production. Prior to joining the LSE, she lived in Beijing and served as managing editor at The World of Chinese, a multimedia English magazine that tells human-centred stories from China. Her journalism focuses on feminism, rural China, and the global Chinese diaspora.

Hatty earned a double Master of Arts degree in Global Communication from Simon Fraser University and the Communication University of China, where her research explored the idea of journalism as a form of literary production. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree from McGill University in History, and an updated version of her capstone project, on the role (and limits) of caricature in public communication in France’s July Monarchy, won the top paper award in communication history at the ICA annual conference in 2016. Her other capstone paper, on the history of female bonded labour in China’s Qing dynasty, was accepted for publication in The Palgrave Handbook on Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia in 2020.

Multilingual and cross-continental, with roots in China, Canada, and the US, Hatty aspires to use her multilingual and cross-cultural identity to create more empathetic knowledge across national boundaries.

Supervisors

Professor Lilie Chouliaraki and Professor Bingchun Meng.