Fan Xiao

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

This article examines the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash fanfiction subculture. Popular among Chinese youth, the writing and reading of slash are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations due to changes in the political environment. Drawing from the theoretical framework of minor transnationalism, the current study situates the deve...

Bridging the theory of affective labor and reproductive labor, this paper proposes “affective reproduction” as a critical framework to analyze the unpaid work of volunteer content moderation. Findings from this study problematize the one-sided focus on streamers in the extant literature on platform labor vis-à-vis live-streaming. It contends that f...

Much research has examined how participants in online support groups (OSGs) seek information or exchange social support while neglecting peer learning among users. Applying the perspective of community of practice (CoP), we conceptualize peer communications in OSGs as a participatory learning process of sharing and managing experiential knowledge....

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the effectiveness of China’s state apparatus and accumulated social discontent in the first half of 2020. Aided by a creative adaptation of a popular music video, a group of Chinese feminists initiated a short-term movement on the Chinese Internet in protest of the propaganda campaign of the Communist Youth Leag...

Despite the distress and disruption associated with eating disorder (ED), people struggling with EDs are often ambivalent about their eating issues and unmotivated for recovery. Rather than seek professional help, these people tend to turn to online ED groups for information and support. Using the stages of change model, this study investigates the...

This project investigates two competing 4chan groups concerned with the war in Ukraine. We follow the pro-Ukrainian (/uhg/) and the pro-Russian (/chug/) threads and their fandomized war reporting. A journalistic register dominates the /uhg/ sets, and a strategic-logistic register dominates the /chug/ sets. The two threads fandomize the Ukrainian wa...

Content moderation is widely performed by online user-generated content (UGC) sites to monitor and regulate discursive environment of vernacular expressions. However, the laboring nature and organization is insufficiently studied, especially for volunteer content moderation conducted by media fans. In this study, I examine volunteer content moderat...

In this study, we examine the notion of online support group as virtual communities of practice (CoPs) through the example of a binge eating online forum. Our qualitative findings emphasize the collaborative, communicative acts of problem-solving among Internet users that go beyond usual categorization of types of support. Three potential themes il...

The COVID-19 outbreak has challenged the effectiveness of China’s state apparatus and accumulated much social discontent in the first half of 2020. Aided by the creative adaptation of an Internet meme, a group of Chinese feminists initiated a short-term movement in the Chinese Internet against the introduction of two virtual representative of the C...

This study contextually echoes the academic debate about the existence and legitimation of Internet users’ privacy/benefit trade-off. While providing evidence for users’ resignation of privacy, this paper also calls for attention from both academic researchers and government regulators. The complexation of online information exchange is impeding co...