CTIS Research Seminar - Warming Our Hands with Moonlight: Intercultural Encounters with Tibetanness on Chinese Digital Platforms
| Dates: | 12 November 2026 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Dr Dongjing Kang |
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Intercultural communication scholarship has often prioritised encounters across national borders, race issues, and nationalism discourses, with less attention to everyday interethnic communication. This study examines how digital media interactions mediate the construction and negotiation of ethnic difference between Han Chinese and Tibetans in China. Historically, the People’s Republic of China adopted a Soviet-inspired system of ethnic classification, while contemporary official discourse increasingly emphasises unity among ethnic groups. Meanwhile, scholarship on internal Orientalism has examined how ethnic minorities are constructed as the internal Other, solidifying the duality between the self and Other. Within this context, this study investigates the representations of Tibetanness surrounding Dingzhen (also known as Tenzin), a Tibetan internet celebrity who gained widespread attention in China in 2020 as “China’s most handsome man.” Drawing on Confucian culturalism, this study uses ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to examine how Dingzhen’s image circulates across major Chinese digital platforms, and how these representations negotiate the relationship between ethnic difference and national belonging. The findings reveal how mediated representations of Tibetanness reshape the boundaries between the cultural self and the Other, and raise questions about the possibilities and limits of post-alteric intercultural encounters. This study extends the understanding of how everyday digital media interactions negotiate cultural inclusion and othering.
The event will be held in hybrid mode. To attend online, please register using the link below.
Teams link: https://tinyurl.com/CTIS-T2-26-27-Kang
Speaker
Dr Dongjing Kang
Role: Associate Professor
Organisation: School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Biography: Dongjing Kang (Ph.D. Ohio University) is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Before joining SJTU, she served as Assistant Professor at Florida Gulf Coast University and Instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver. She is currently the president of the International Association of Chinese Communication Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of (Inter)cultural and International Communication, Organisational Communication, and Development Studies. She has published articles in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Social Media+Society, Management Communication Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Conference room C1.18
Ellen Wilkinson Building
Manchester
