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Welcome! I'm Jing Wang. It is written as 王菁 in Chinese. The given name jīng 菁 conveys my mom's best wishes: knowing the essence of things and growing like wild grass in this wild world. Hope our paths cross soon!

About

As an anthropologist and media scholar, I am an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm also an affiliated faculty at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at UW-Madison. Before joining SJMC, I worked as Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with an affiliation at the Center of the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC).

My research lies in the intersection among global communication, technology, and culture. I specialize in the anthropology of Islam, race, ethnicity and gender, and digital studies such as online forums and podcasts. My research concerns mass media and critical technology studies, marginalization and social justice, feminist knowledge production, and public and multimodal scholarship. At its core, my scholarship attends to how socially disadvantaged communities make their own voices heard and how media helps us understand the past injustices and imagine a more equitable, just future for minority subjects.

Currently, I am working on a book manuscript under contract with Columbia University Press. This book examines the media practices of Chinese Muslims to construct and sustain vibrant Islamic publics in a Global South, Muslim-minority context. I have published in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media and Society, Made In China Journal, Media Theory, Asian Anthropology, Journal of Contemporary East Asia, Terrain: Anthropologie & Sciences Humaines, and Journal of Transformative Learning.

For my second book project, I plan to examine the intersections of social justice and marginalization, feminist knowledge creation, and critical perspectives on mass media systems and technologies. I aim to explore the following questions:

How to excavate and re-evaluate the contribution of women – especially women of color – in the media industries as well as academic disciplines?
How to offer alternative genealogies of global media histories from the perspectives of feminist ethics and theories?
How can a global and critical approach to Science and Technology Studies and media histories help us imagine a more just, equitable future with emergent technologies such as podcasting and generative artificial intelligence?

Meanwhile, multimodality and collaboration are central to my public-facing scholarship. I am a podcaster, archivist, curator, and translator. In 2015, I joined CNPolitics 政见 and initiated its podcast series. In 2020, I co-founded TyingKnots 结绳志, an independent, non-profit, volunteer-based group committed to breaking down walls between academia, media, and the public through translation projects and the promotion of public-facing scholarship. From September 2022 to July 2023, I co-founded and produced the Global Media & Communication podcast series as part of the multimodal project powered by the Center of Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. My commentaries and essays feature in academic and public media outlets such as Anthropology News, Pop Junctions, Today's Totalitarianism, Asian Review of Books, Initium, Inkstone, CNpolitics, Oriental History Review, TyingKnots, among others.