About
Yizhou (Joe) Xu is a global media scholar and former media industry professional interested in the mobile tech and game industry in China. Specifically, he looks at how tech laborers work within and against the various constraints imposed by government policies, corporate institutions, societal pressures and platform infrastructures in governing mobile software production. He is concerned with how tech workers make sense of their everyday experiences in the light of increasing state, corporate and platform control, and how such relational processes shape their livelihoods and subjectivities in the formation of possible solidarities, community and activism. He spent more than a year working within the mobile tech industry in China as part of his immersive fieldwork in unraveling the often opaque labor process behind global software production.
Dr. Xu has published in academic journals such as Social Media + Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Communication and the Public. He received his PhD in Media & Cultural Studies at UW–Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. Prior to academia, Dr. Xu was a documentarian and broadcast journalist based in Beijing working for new agencies including CBS News, NPR, and Swiss TV. His documentaries have been broadcasted in Europe and distributed globally on Amazon Prime.
