USC U.S.-China Institute's video: Social Media And Social Transformation In Contemporary China

Cara Wallis an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans the fields of mobile communication, critical studies of technology, media studies, China studies and women’s and gender studies. Her research examines the mutually constitutive nature of new media technologies, modes of power and the intersections of multiple axes of identity, including gender, class and place (urban/rural). She is concerned with socio-techno practices, or how technology is integrated into existing social practices, thereby opening up spaces for individual and collective agency as well as the retrenchment of modes of domination. She is especially interested in how socio-techno practices emerge among groups that are socially or economically marginalized. To study these processes, she employs qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, interviews, case studies and textual analysis. She primarily conducts research in China but has also studied such processes in the United States.