About
50
Publications
10,338
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
611
Citations
Introduction
My research interests encompass urban consumption, everyday practices and popular culture. My recent research projects are committed to investigating how the dynamic time-space of the everyday is situated in the contemporary commercialised world and how more-than-human practices in the mundane impact social and environmental sustainability. Currently, I am working on a book project of ‘Curating Digital Lives’ that explores consumer cultures shaped by current digitalisation trend.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (50)
This book explores the emergent relationship between food and family in contemporary China through an empirical case study of Guangzhou, a typical city, to understand the texture of everyday life in the new consumerist society. The primary focus of this book is on the family dynamics of middle-income households in Guangzhou, where everyday food pra...
This article considers haptic—the sense of touch in all its forms—as an assemblage of performative and situated knowledge, multisensory experiences, digital and material relationalities, and everyday practices, that is shaping and shaped by domestic atmospheres and affects. It brings research topics on haptic geographies and geographies of home int...
As consumer cultures become increasingly digital and the digital/data has become more commodified, geographers have turned their attention to researching the ways in which consumption spaces, socialities and subjectivities are (re)produced by the digitalisation of everyday life. This article investigates the relationships between the digital and ge...
Although geographers have long argued that time and space are interwoven in everyday life, far less attention has been paid to complex and multiplex connections among temporal rhythms/cycles, the experience of temporal relations and a sense of temporal modalities in the domestic sphere. This article harnesses the notion of ‘timescape’, which emphas...
Considering food consumption as an important daily practice, this article explores how and why Chinese young people consume takeaway food – a typical type of convenience food – and whether this food practice creates a wasteful urban lifestyle, drawing on a qualitative analysis. The key finding of this research suggests that Chinese young people hav...
Using empirical cases that show the entanglement of material and immaterial aspects of digital technologies within the dynamic spatiotemporalities of everyday practices, this book argues for a more sophisticated and local understanding of how the interactions between digital platforms and urban lives are implicated in the making/remaking geographie...
City image is essential for city marketing, yet the impact of “outside–in” shaping by social media in the Web 2.0 era has been largely overlooked. The decentralized and diverse Web 2.0 environment now dominates online information dissemination, influencing not just cyberspace, but also the physical urban landscape. These externally driven city imag...
This article presents the design and practice of a field course program that combines the urban walking tradition and digitally enabled mobile learning. This program adopts the concept of flâneur/flâneuse to develop a peripatetic pedagogy aiming to cultivate students’ digitally assisted ethnographic skills; and to assist students in writing the dig...
This article investigates how the representations of smart home build upon gendered narratives of home as a carescape in the Chinese market on the basis of a qualitative analysis of smart home advertisements in the Chinese market. From a gender-technology perspective, it unveils contradictory narratives of gendered care and domestic carescapes aris...
The key purpose of this article is to provide a nuanced understanding of the platform-city-people nexus shaped by digitally mediated mobilities. This article focuses on urban practices of walking, driving and ride-hailing with mobile technologies and their failures on an everyday basis in urban Guangzhou (a megacity in south China), based on an ana...
This article examines the complex and dynamic practices in the smart home and how these practices are socially and emotionally engaged in daily encounters with different human and non-human actors, drawing on a 14-month autoethnography. Based on the investigation of my own experiences of setting up, using and getting rid of smart home technologies,...
This article focuses on three types of domestic alcohol practices: drinking at home, accommodating alcohol products, and crafting alcohol drinks. It explores how Chinese young people associate their emotional, creative, and embodied experiences with domestic alcohol consumption and how the social and material space of home shapes their alcohol-rela...
This article focuses on the ‘small moments’ of digitally mediated mobilities in the mundane. Drawing on a qualitative GIS analysis of people’s walking, driving and ride-hailing in urban Guangzhou (a megacity in south China), this article maps the complex and dynamic anxieties from a social practice perspective. It argues that anxieties of daily mob...
This paper explores common theoretical and empirical terrain across currently distinct bodies of geographical literature. Presenting ethnographic research undertaken in China we highlight the ways in which alcohol, drinking, drunkenness is bound up with everyday financial lives through relational connections between family and work times/spaces. Fo...
This article outlines the connections between technologies (mobile devices, photo-editing apps, social media, and so on), people, and digital/physical places through the lens of everyday photography practices. It contributes to wider discussions in digital geographies by investigating affective social media’s role in the embodied and performative p...
This article explores how Muslim spaces in urban China have been regulated under the influence of transnational mobilities in the past few decades, based on a qualitative study. Our key findings demonstrate that the Chinese government applies distinctive strategies to control different types of Muslim spaces: The temporary religious places for fore...
Against a backdrop where since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there has been little political, policy, policing or popular resonances of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness as being problematic, this paper explores ambivalence toward strangers, avoidance of social mixing and sensitivity to integrational socio-spatial relati...
Drawing on the practical perspective and the posthuman approach, this article maps the digital geographies of selfie practices in the quotidian. The empirical analysis of this research is based on a qualitative study that takes place in a Chinese city – Guangzhou. The empirical sections of this research investigate the digital geographies of daily...
with the development of e-commerce, the increase of smartphone users and the flourish of food delivery services, ordering takeaway food online has become popular among Chinese young adults during the past five years. However, this way of food consumption has brought about many social and environmental problems, such as the increase of household was...
This article draws on empirical research to develop an understanding of the social and cultural geography of food and its waste in the workplace. Our aim is to contribute to the wider body of literature on everyday geographies of waste and wasting in relation to food, paying attention to the complex trajectories of the disposal of the waste produce...
This article explores how Muslim immigrants negotiate their family practices and religious identities in secular Guangzhou, a global city in south China, drawing on an in‐depth qualitative analysis. It provides a lens for better understanding the interrelationship between family practices, transnational mobility and religious values spatially in Ch...
This article focuses on the rural–urban inequality and its impacts on the meanings and practices of sustainability in Chinese context, based on a qualitative analysis of 30 semi-structure interviews with key practitioners. This research understands sustainability to be ‘simultaneously an ideological stance, a point of convergence for political stru...
Debates about intergenerational fairness and resource-use are prominent in diverse international contexts, with a large number of social policy and environmental concerns characterised as having intergenerational dimensions. This includes concerns relating to synchronic equity (how resources are distributed between living generations) and diachroni...
The notion of sustainable consumption has gained significant traction in recent decades, in parallel with unprecedented growth in global consumption and recognition of its catastrophic environmental impacts. In this context, there is a predominant generational narrative of frugality versus excess, with younger generations often negatively stereotyp...
This article aims to understand how Chinese Muslims negotiate their identities and how they are included and excluded in urban Guangzhou – a multicultural and multi-ethnic city in south China – through the lens of food. This empirical research consists of intersectional and interactional analysis based on narratives of both the ethnic majority and...
This article examines how urban Ugandans navigate family support systems through a focus on the under-researched area of sibling care practices. We conceptualise such systems as transgenerational infrastructure to capture the complex flows, negotiations and dilemmas of both inter- and intra-generational relationships, orderings and power, situating...
This article explores the concept of sustainability in a postsocialist context through an analysis of official discourses relating to sustainability in more than 700 articles published in the Chinese‐language newspaper People's Daily in 2015. The Chinese conception of sustainability, which emerges as a top‐down model built upon traditional ideologi...
This article examines how ordinary people practice the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ in relation to their everyday lives and experiences of the wider environment and how these understandings relate to public discourses of sustainability in contemporary China. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of 129 narrative interviews with local r...
There is an urgent need to understand lived experiences of climate change in the context of African cities, where even small climate shocks can have significant implications for the livelihoods of the urban poor. This article examines narratives of climate and livelihood changes within Jinja Municipality, Uganda, emphasizing how Jinja's residents m...
Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policy-making, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Its definitions are contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoptio...
This article explores the creative consumption of popular music and explains how audiences involve their place-based emotions within their representations of popular music in an everyday setting, drawing on a qualitative study on people’s interpretations of Phoenix Legend (a popular music duo in mainland China) and its music. We collected the texts...
Social geography research on familial spaces and intimate relations has generated valuable literatures on parenting and grand-parenting in modern nuclear families. However, the complex intergenerational relations and geographies of multi-generational households remain under-researched, limiting geographers’ understanding of familial spatialities. T...
This article is concerned with the intimate spousal relations through the analysis of their management of daily meals and domestic food work. It extends beyond research focused on the relations between gendered power, identity and the space of home, through a focus on food practices. Based on three case studies, this empirical research analyses how...
For exploring vegetarian eating in contemporary Guangzhou, this article employs the concept of ‘ethical eating’ and the framework of ethical consumption as outlined by Clive Barnett and his coauthors to examine food practices in a vegetarian restaurant through two dimensions: the restaurant dimension and the consumer dimension (2005b). Drawing on t...
This article attempts to deconstruct the masculinised contract among the war narrative, popular culture, and Chinese nationalism by exploring the roles of women in Nanjing Massacre films with war narratives and Chinese audiences' emotional ‘readings’ of these women. Based on the analysis of City of Life and Death (2009) and The Flowers of War (2011...
Based on the notions of ‘popular geopolitics’ and ‘practical geopolitics’, this article explores how China’s geopolitical strategies are represented and reproduced by the popular songs in the CCTV (China Central Television) Spring Festival Gala during the past thirty years (1983–2013). Drawing on the (con)textual and visual analysis of 539 popular...
The main purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which popular music in Guangzhou is implicated in the performance of places and identities, and how it is located in Guangzhou. Drawing on the qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews, this research analyses the popular music and musical performances in Guangzhou throug...
Popular music in Guangzhou can be considered as a noise that applies social and political power to challenge the mainstream aesthetics and ideologies, rather than a low culture that lacks aesthetics. The main purpose of this article is to examine the cultural politics of underground popular music in contemporary Guangzhou, drawing on the analysis o...
