Jueling Hu

photo

 jueling.hu@unifr.ch
 +41 26 300 9212

  • Visual and Digital Culture
  • Speculative Fiction
  • Animal Geography
  • Mutlispecies Urbanism (River and Waterway)
  • Critical Theory (Queer, Postcolonial, and Southern Theory)

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 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. 

Research and publications

  • Publications
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