Biography

I (she/they/ta/dia) am a joint Ph.D. candidate in Human Geography at the University of Fribourg and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. 

My research examines changing social imaginaries of human-animal relations in Southeast Asian cities. I work with a range of media, including literature, film, visual arts, and digital media to grasp popular culture that envisions the co-existence of nonhuman species in urbanized nature. I draw upon decolonial, indigenous, queer, and more-than-human approaches to unfold multispecies encounters.

My dissertation project interrogates collective imaginaries of human-crocodile relations circulated in postcolonial Malaysian Borneo, exploring the multiplicity of crocodile lives in the urban regions across Indigenous Dayak, Chinese, and Malay ethnic communities. In this project, I pay particular attention to the transitions of human-animal relations from familiar kins to alienated predators. This project is rooted in scholarships such as multispecies justice, more-than-human cities, environmental media, and eco-futures.

I am a junior research member of the SNF-funded project Cultural Logistics of Chinese Science Fiction. In this project, I use speculative fiction as a method to explore the (im)possible ecological futures among Chinese diasporic communities in maritime Southeast Asia. I collect Sinophone speculative fiction (text, film, and audio-visual art) produced by Chinese communities in Malaysian Borneo and examine the stories within the intercultural exchanges between Sinophone and non-Sinophone communities in the multi-ethnic society. I particularly focus on the concept of “species” within these stories and analyze the continuum between race, animality, and ecology under postcolonial contexts.

I am one of the guest editors of the special issue Tropical Futurisms in eTropic (2024, Q1 in Cultural Studies). This special issue situates the reading of futures in the shared yet multiple modalities of this geographical zone, acknowledging the social and political complexities, technological engagements, multispecies vitalities, and cosmological plurality within these regions. 

In my previous master’s project, I examined human-robot intimacy imagined in Japanese popular culture. From a post-humanist, new materialist, and affective theoretical approach, I analyzed queerness of the mechanical species through the discussion on the ontologies of robot subjectivity. My thesis The Mechanical Heart: Speculative Human-Robot Intimacy in Japan can be found in the library of the University of Amsterdam.

Besides my academic practices, my small audio-visual work Crocodiles in the Cosmos has been exhibited at Borneo Rainforest Music Festival (2024) and Huawei Digital Art Festival (2024) in Sarawak, Malaysia. 

I speak Hunanese (native), Hubeiese (native), Chinese (native), English (professional), and Japanese (B2). I understand German (A2), Bahasa Melayu (A2), and French (A1).