Jing Wang is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC). Wang is also an affiliated faculty and a member of Steering Committee at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at UW-Madison.
Wang’s research lies in the intersection among global communication, technology, and culture. She specializes in the digital studies such as online forums and podcasts, anthropology of Islam, and race, ethnicity and gender studies. Her research concerns mass media and critical technology studies, marginalization and social justice, feminist knowledge production, and public and multimodal scholarship. At its core, her scholarship attends to how socially disadvantaged communities make their own voices heard and how media helps us understand the past injustices and imagine a more equitable, just future for minority subjects.
Currently, Wang is working on a book manuscript under contract with Columbia University Press. This book examines the media practices of Chinese Muslims to construct and sustain vibrant Islamic publics in a Global South, Muslim-minority context. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media and Society, Media Theory, Made In China Journal, Asian Anthropology, Journal of Contemporary East Asia, Terrain: Anthropologie & Sciences Humaines, and Journal of Transformative Learning.
For her second book project, Wang examines the intersections of social justice and marginalization, feminist knowledge creation, and critical perspectives on mass media systems and technologies. Specifically, she explores the following questions:
- How to excavate and re-evaluate the contribution of women – especially women of color – in the media industries as well as academic disciplines?
- How to offer alternative genealogies of global media histories from the perspectives of feminist ethics and theories?
- How can a global and critical approach to Science and Technology Studies and media histories help us imagine a more just, equitable future with emergent technologies such as podcasting and generative artificial intelligence?
Meanwhile, multimodality and collaboration are central to Wang’s public-facing scholarship. She is a podcaster, archivist, curator, and translator. In 2015, Wang joined CNPolitics 政见 and initiated its podcast series. In 2020, she co-founded TyingKnots 结绳志, an independent, non-profit, volunteer-based group committed to breaking down walls between academia, media, and the public through translation projects and the promotion of public-facing scholarship. From September 2022 to July 2023, Wang co-founded and produced the Global Media & Communication podcast series as part of the multimodal project powered by the Center of Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her commentaries and essays feature in academic and public media outlets such as Anthropology News, Pop Junctions, Today’s Totalitarianism, Asian Review of Books, Initium, Inkstone, CNpolitics, Oriental History Review, among others.
Education
- Ph.D., Socio/Cultural Anthropology, Rice University
- M.A., Socio/Cultural Anthropology, Rice University
- B.A., English Language and Literature, Renmin University of China
Selected Publications
- “Finding Wang Tonghui: The Life & After-life of a Pioneer Female Chinese Anthropologist.” Feminist Anthropology (forthcoming)
- “Small apps for digital futures: Podcasting ecology in contemporary China.” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media (2023)
- “Affective Matrivocality and Women’s Voices: A History of Muslim Women Writers in China.” Matrilineal, Matriarchal, and Matrifocal Islam: The World of Women-Centric Islam (2024)
- “What Can White Papers Do?” Co-authored with Mengzhu An and Wei Ye. Anthropology News (2024)
- “Postcritical Sensibilities for the Study of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Co-authored with Kelly Diaz, Adetobi Moses, and Guobin Yang. Media Theory (2023)
- “Networked Islamic Counterpublic in China: Digital Media and Chinese Muslims during Global Pandemic of COVID-19.” New Media and Society (2022)
- “Lockdown Sound Diaries: Podcasting and Affective Listening in the Shanghai Lockdown.” Made in China Journal: 7(1): 150-61 (2022)
- “Between Merchant Network and Memory Work: On Islamic Cosmopolitanism along the Silk Roads.” Asian Anthropology (2021)
- “Reflections on productive discomfort and the right amount of confusion, frustration and success.” Journal of Transformative Learning, 8(1), co-authored with Jace Hargis (2021)
- “Limits of Multicultural Imagination and the Anti-Refugee Controversy in Contemporary China.” Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia 19, No. 2: 125-147 (2020)
- “Tiptoeing along the Red Lines: On Chinese Muslims’ use of self-censorship in contemporary China.” Terrain 72 (2019)
Courses to Offer in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024
Recommendation Letter Solicitation Prerequisites
Wang is deeply committed to students’ success both in the short and long terms. To provide a compelling letter, she would accept to write recommendation letters for undergraduate and graduate students, ONLY IF they:
- Take two or more classes with her and have talked to her in office hours, project meetings, and other in-person occasions;
- Or work with her as Teaching Assistants and/or Research Assistants
- For TAs, she needs to observe at least one of her TAs’ teaching sections to write a compelling, detailed letter;
- For RAs, she needs to have in-person meetings with them, get to know their projects more in-depth, and/or collaborate with them in a research project before writing a compelling, detailed letter;
- Or are her advisees and for whom she serves as a dissertation committee member
- As a committee member, she needs to have multiple meetings with them through their graduate trajectories and get to know their projects more in-depth before writing a compelling, detailed letter.