ICR students receive Global Intersections Grant

Congratulations to Jane Pyo and Jingyi Gu! The Center for Global Studies announced their project, “All-in-one apps: the techno-cultural regime of WeChat and KakaoTalk,” as a successful proposal and recipient of a Global Intersections Grant for Spring 2020. Their project aims to understand how digital platforms, especially messaging apps, function as unavoidable infrastructure in our social lives and become new modes of national governance. They specifically focus on messaging apps that are based in East Asia—WeChat from China and Kakaotalk from South Korea—and ask questions about how they have become infrastructures by combining various features other than simple messaging. They also argue for a comparative and contextualized perspective to platform studies that have previously focused heavily on the global expansion of “Western-based” apps.

Pyo is a second-year PhD student in the Institute of Communications Research. Her research interest lies at the intersection between online social movements, journalism, and platform studies. Her current research project is to understand how online social movements that adopts aggressiveness and incivility could be used as a mode of resistance against the authoritative journalism in the context of South Korea.

Gu is a PhD student in the Institute of Communications Research. Her research mainly looks at gender and sexuality in online social space and digital culture. Gu is also interested in exploring the formation of identities and communities on digital platforms within various cultural and national contexts, including the United States and East Asia.