A Personal Paper-Reading Method

I was thinking about how I could read and understand academic publications better. I came up with the following skeleton for myself.

First, grab the following points (bolded are the must-learns):

  1. Topic: What are the relevant fields of this paper? (Later, how are the authors contributing to these fields?)
    • Audience: To whom are the authors speaking?
  2. Argument(s): What statements/arguments are the authors making?
  3. Research questions (RQs): What research questions do the authors ask?
  4. Methodology: How do the authors answer the research questions?
    • Theoretical lens: Have they used any theoretical lenses in answering RQs?
    • Model: Have they applied any models?
    • Experiment: Have they conducted any experiments?
  5. (Findings: What do they find to answer RQs? How do the findings relate back to RQs?)
  6. Contribution(s): What new/critical knowledge have the authors produced?
    • Novel theory: Have the authors produced novel or built upon existing theories? Theories can also be models, frameworks, etc.
    • (Theoretical) New perspective: Have the authors offered any new perspectives to understand existing phenomena?
    • (Theoretical) New methodology: Have the authors offered any new methodologies for answering a certain type of RQs/phenomena?
    • New intervention: Have the authors built any new, important, meaningful interventions?
    • (Empirical) New, important ways of using technology: Have the authors discovered any novel and critical ways of using technology? Usually, such empirical findings can feedback to new learnings to existing theories or even inspire new theories.

Second, while reading, I can ask these questions to myself (bolded & italicized means it’s only important for myself):

  • Significance: How do the authors argue the significance of the study?
  • RQs-Contribution: What is the relationship between RQs and contribution(s)?
  • Related work: How do the authors write Related Work (to support their arguments, maybe)? (How does this study build on past learnings?)
  • Actors: What are the actors (human or non-humans) involved in this paper?
  • Terminologies: What are the terms the authors relied on? Did they create any new terms?
  • Strength and weakness: In my opinion, what is the one single strength (and weakness) of the paper?
  • Future work: How can future work build on this study?
  • Personal belief/value: Is this work speak to my belief/value? Why or why not? (Do I want to become a researcher who does this kind of work?)

Stories from Beijing

A few things/people I encountered when I was in Beijing doing fieldwork in Fall 2018.

Story 4. Aug 21st, 2018.

11:05 pm. I was just out from Dongzhimen subway station, back from an interview. The was another 10-minute walk before I could get back home. Clutching my backpack tightly in front of me, I kept reminding myself that this is Beijing; it’s safe and there’s nothing to worry about. Before long, I saw evidence of such safety. A guy in a white shirt was throwing up intensively in the hollow made up by two tires stacked together neatly. Apparently drunk, but harmless. Not sure why there were tires though. A few steps later, there was a couple sitting on the ground beside the walkway. The man was smoking silently, forming clouds above himself. The women had her head down on his laps, crying loudly.
The Beijing with a midsummer night’s dream.

Story 3. Aug 21st, 2018.

I don’t think I have seen anyone carries his/her wallet around. Neither cash nor credit cards. But definitely a smartphone and maybe also a battery bank (in case there are no public battery bank leasing cabinets). At restaurants, you scan the QR code on your table to order and pay inside the restaurant’s WeChat mini app. On subways or buses, you tap your phone screen to the card reader to pay. To enjoy any street food, scan the seller’s personal WeChat QR code to pay; he/she will print out the QR code on a piece of paper and stick it on the food truck. Internet is never an issue. Mobile connectivity is so good no matter you are indoor, outdoor, underground, or high up on Mount Everest. All you need is a phone connected with China Mobile’s network, with your WeChat logged in and a bank account registered.

Story 2. Aug 14th, 2018.

McDonald's WeChat mini app

I was at a McDonald’s, ready to order from one of the big screens standing in front me. Almost touching the screen with my finger, a woman’s voice rang into my ear: “Ma’am, are you our member? You can become our member from within our WeChat mini app and you will get daily special discount exclusive to our mini app. You don’t have to use this screen to order; just open your WeChat and go to our mini app.” Following the voice, I saw a young woman with McDonald’s uniform and another older women busy working with her phone — apparently, she was instructed as I did moments ago.

I did what I heard. I saw the WeChat McDonald’s mini app recognized my location and then identified the store I was at without making any mistakes. Then I ordered what I wanted — the meal was much cheaper (as today’s daily special) than buying the sandwich alone, so why not buy the meal? The mini app naturally prompted payment with WeChat pay. Then I received my calling number in the mini app. I hit the top right black dot and ring button. The mini app closed, I was brought to where I was at in WeChat.

A few minutes later, my number was called at the counter. I showed my number and grabbed my dinner. Efficiency.

Story 1. Aug 13th, 2018.

Beijing Transportation Card in iPhone wallet

Right after I landed at Beijing airport, I got notified by my iPhone, saying that I could add the Beijing public transportation card to my phone wallet. I did that and then loaded money to the card directly (“you will get your 20 CNY deposit back!”). The entire interaction was very smooth. Next day I hopped on to a bus and tried to tap my phone to the card reader. I touched my phone once. It didn’t work. I looked like a hopeless barbarian. A girl with a modern look beside me held my phone impatiently, changed my phone angle swiftly, touched the reader again, and the reader uttered a clear beep sound. Wow! What a sound that welcomes me to the mysterious digital Beijing!

























A Cyborg Story: Study WeChat Users and Practices through Feminist Theory and STS

(Note: This short essay is my final piece of homework for the class Feminist Theory and STS, taught by Dr. Anne Pollock. I tried to draw connections between my research on WeChat and what I learned from this class. It was a great mental exercise for me to think about my dissertation, and I hope you enjoy reading it as well.)

To be able to engage with feminist theories and STS in my own research projects is one of my major purposes of taking this class. In this essay, I will talk about my prospective dissertation topic and discuss how feminist theories and STS will shed light on it from various angles.

Recent years, social networks start booming more than ever. The fast development of the Internet and the widespread of smartphones make it possible for people to connect with each other at nearly any time and anywhere, and social networks are the foundation for this connected virtual “web.” With an interest in culture, technology, and social networks, I’m eager to learn how culture and technology affect each other in the shape of social networking, and what a “cultural” social network means and possibly looks like. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I will take one single technology as a case to study: WeChat. WeChat is the most popular mobile instant messenger in China. However, different from other instant messaging tools such as WhatsApp or Line, WeChat is not only a mobile instant messenger but also a social network. In fact, being an instant messenger or a social network is only a small part of it; it is a huge mobile platform that almost encompasses everything, including money transaction, news subscription, online shopping and many more (Lawrence, 2016). WeChat users often find themselves spending most of their time interacting with WeChat, without the need to switch to other applications. Besides this most outstanding characteristic, WeChat is mostly used by Chinese people, unlike Facebook, whose users come from various countries. This relatively coherent user base in terms of nationality and the powerful functional integration of WeChat attract me. How do people use WeChat, if they are all Chinese but have diverse life experiences and coming from different backgrounds (e.g., gender, age, education, occupation, etc.)? How are people’s lives influenced, if any, by WeChat? In addition, I want to know if people’s use of WeChat influences WeChat itself, in some ways. All in all, I would like to study the co-construction of WeChat and its users in the context of contemporary China.

Having conducted two studies on WeChat, I’m currently at the stage of planning my next study and thinking about the overall story to tell in my dissertation as well. Reflecting on what I learned throughout this semester, I believe I can see several possibilities for my next steps, inspired by feminist theory and STS.

First, feminist theory and STS can offer me new places to start from. Feminist theorist and philosopher Sandra Harding criticizes the common, conventional understanding of “objectivity” (which usually relates to absolute truth, fairness, and equality) of not being truly objective. Instead, she argues for a “strong objectivity,” where studies of our world should originate more from minorities and those who haven’t been heard of in the past (e.g., the poor, the oppressed), so that our knowledge will be more complete, and thus achieves the strong objectivity (Harding, 1993). Thinking about this call of starting from women’s lives, I remember interviewing rural Chinese villagers a year ago. To my surprise, female villagers tended to know much more about information technologies than their husbands or brothers. This was because “sticking to the phone all the time is perceived as ‘not doing formal business’ and also ‘a waste of (men’s) time’ and thus only women will do that,” explained one of my female interviewees. However, such a technology proficiency, together with the design of WeChat and the stable nationwide Internet connection, in fact, turns out to support female villagers to earn spare money through WeChat and hence gain more freedom and say in their families that they couldn’t expect before. Indeed, as Wajcman says, “the materiality of technology affords or inhibits the doing of particular gender power relations” (Wajcman, 2010). A promising next move could be continuously digging deeper into female WeChat users’ lives and learn how they use WeChat to fulfill their needs.

Second, feminist theory and STS can also be my powerful analytic tool. Apply feminist epistemology to a case or phenomenon to gain insights is an old trick in feminist theory and STS. For instance, by describing black women’s experiences at American airports from a feminist standpoint with particular attention to these women, the preconceptions and discriminations imposed on them become more evident (Browne, 2015). I can map the same technique to one of my previous studies where I researched how Chinese people sent emoji on WeChat. I could ask questions such as what are the emoji used more by female users, what is the consequence of sending erotic stickers to women, and how do female and male WeChat users understand the same emoji differently. By examining my past study from a refreshing feminist lens, I hope to uncover some implicit gender dichotomies and underlying discourses in the emoji world, just as what Emily Martin does to contrast how people talk about the egg and the sperm differently (Martin, 1991).

Third, feminist theory and STS push me to imagine alternatives, both for future and for technology. The question that I keep asking myself in the course of studying WeChat is, what is the alternative form of WeChat? In the context of feminist theory and STS, I can ask, is it possible for WeChat to be feminist and what does a “feminist” WeChat look like? In her book Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster describes the roles played by the plant Hoodia in different communities, including the San people, the South African scientists, the drug companies, and the Hoodia growers (Foster, 2017). By putting forward these distinct and sometimes conflicting roles of the same object, we can easily see the flexibility and also the diverse possibilities of Hoodia. Similarly, Nakamura tells the story of the company Fairchild Semiconductor building its plant on Navajo land and discusses how parties such as Fairchild executives, Navajo leaders, and the media all had their own understandings of this project, which again addresses that the project itself was never neutral or independent but subject to interpretations and changes coming from all directions (Nakamura, 2014). To envision alternative WeChats, I can learn from this method and describe what WeChat means to people who are younger, who are older, who are disabled, who invest money in it, who spend their time to develop it and more. Different images of WeChat will emerge from different people’s views, and altogether they will reach a feminist collection of WeChats.

Taking a step back, the projects I listed above seem to reflect a common theme: cyborg. Cyborg, in feminist theory, is a concept raised by Donna Haraway to contest the singular and dominating understanding of identity. In her A Cyborg Manifesto, she challenges widespread dichotomies (e.g., human vs. animal, culture vs. nature) that people rely on to describe (and categorize) themselves and the world (Haraway, 1991). She believes the fixed, homogeneous view of identity should be shattered, and cyborg is the alternative “identity” she comes up, in which humans are not pure but mingle with animals, technologies, and other objects or concepts that people traditionally will not think of. Coming back to my own project, I am convinced that nobody and no object will be left innocent in the world of social networks. Cyber, but not virtual, identities consciously or unconsciously established by every single WeChat user are instances of cyborg. An unchangeable identity is rendered impossible because everybody is a cyborg. On the other hand, WeChat, even usually seen as a passive technology, could also be a cyborg because it exerts power but receives power from users (and/or non-users) and other societal forces too. Cyborgs are the basis of the fluid WeChat world. In the end, I strive to avoid any dualism because there will only be connections and networks in a cyborg space. With the lead of cyborg, I hope the pieces in my dissertation will all come together and shine illuminating lights.

One of the last pieces I read for this class is Sara Ahmed’s Bringing Feminist Theory Home. In that chapter, she says feminism matters everywhere and “feminism is homework” (Ahmed, 2017). By homework, she means that feminism should be the kind of homework that we voluntarily assign to ourselves not only inside academic setting but also outside in our daily lives. With this essay, I hope I successfully complete one of self-assigned feminist homework, marking only the beginning of more homework, as both a woman and a feminist STS scholar.




  • Ahmed, S. (2017). Bringing Feminist Theory Home. In Living a Feminist Life (pp. 1–18). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/qui.2012.0008
  • Browne, S. (2015). “What Did TSA Find in Solange’s Fro”?: Security Theater at the Airport. In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (pp. 133–159). Duke University Press.
  • Foster, L. A. (2017). Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
  • Harding, S. (1993). Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is “Strong Objectivity”? In L. Alcoff & E. Potter (Eds.), Feminist Epistemologies (pp. 49–82). Routledge.
  • Lawrence, D. (2016, June). Life in the People’s Republic of WeChat. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/life-in-the-people-s-republic-of-wechat
  • Martin, E. (1991). The Egg and the Sperm : How Science Has Constructed a Male-Female Roles. Signs, 16(3), 485–501.
  • Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture. American Quarterly, 66(4), 919–941. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2014.0070
  • Wajcman, J. (2010). Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 143–152. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/ben057

The Pleasure of Being a Ph.D. Student


To Be a Cyborg or Not?





Imagine Alternative Sciences and Identities











Truth Claims in Science, Technology, and Society



























Do Justice to Your Data

I met with my advisor two weeks before a major conference deadline. It was a Saturday. She had a coffee in her hand, and she was telling me how some other students had so many things to write in their paper:

“I guess this may due to culture. You know, both of them have so much to say. The finding section is already 9 pages and it’s only one-third of all the findings!”

I listened closely and replied that I never had so much to say. It in fact sounded pretty weird to me that people wrote so long. My advisor continued to say, data had to go through the researcher to be visible and I might affect those data. I was stunned. Yes, I know as a human being I’m not the kind of person who can talk on and on. I feel more comfortable when I can keep silence. However, for writing an academic paper, I know I have to write and I will certainly make sure that I offer as much data as it requires. But my advisor said:

“Yes I know. But still, your data will go through you. They are expressed in the way you express.”

I suddenly realized her point and yelled: “OMG I feel so bad about my data! They are suffering just because I don’t have much to say!” Since then I know I have to do justice for my data – these are great data which have value in themselves. They should not suffer because of me.