Congratulations to Jingyi Gu, Recipient of the 2021 Smalley Graduate Research Fellowship in GWS

The 2021 Barbara and Donald Smalley Graduate Research Fellowship in Gender and Women's Studies has been awarded to Jingyi Gu, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Institute of Communications Research in the College of Media, along with a graduate minor in Gender and Women's Studies.  The Smalley Fellowship is awarded annually to a graduate minor in Gender and Women's Studies whose dissertation proposal promises to make an outstanding contribution to the field of gender and/or sexuality studies.

Gu describes her research as encompassing multidisciplinary scholarly training that is, “rooted in media and cultural studies, but also informed by science and technology studies (STS), gender and women's studies, and Asian studies.” This training has piqued her scholarly interest in gender and sexuality in today’s digital culture, topic she explores in her dissertation entitled “Mediating Intimacy and Performing Labour: Gender and Sexuality in Chinese Live/fe Streaming.”

As Gu explains, “I build upon a feminist approach informed by gender and women studies, to underline the matrix of power and pinpoint the exchange of labor and commodity behind the seemingly ‘neutral’ technological components with radical ‘bottom-up’ knowledge from ‘situated’ perspectives.”

As part of the award, Gu will present a public talk on her work during the Spring 2021 semester.  Please look for more information to come!