2025 RTP round - Diaspora Influencers in Southeast Asia.

Status: Opening

Applications open: 1/07/2024
Applications close: 20/08/2024

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About this scholarship
Description/Applicant information

Project Overview

With the popularisation of social media, channels and accounts featuring people with diasporic and migrant backgrounds have gained increasing visibility. By sharing their everyday lives in countries far from home, through social media content, these people forge intimate social connections and affinities with their audiences, often those who share their identities (Cabalquinto & Soriano, 2020; Leurs & Ponzanesi, 2018). The sense of sisterhood or siblingship, established through their content, serves as a crucial place for migrants to maintain their transnational connections with wider audiences and cultivate a sense of belonging (Lee & Lee, 2022). This sense of belonging frequently evolves into virtual diaspora communities, where migrant content creators and their audiences come together to mobilise collective and collaborative actions centred around their identity performance (Lee & Lee, 2023). 
The notion of Asian diaspora in the digital age has become all the more salient during the pandemic, where the sociocultural functions of online platforms facilitated the communion and community of citizens 'stranded' across the world (Abidin & Zeng, 2020). People with Asian diasporic identities have turned to a wide array of social media platforms and communities, ranging from Facebook groups, YouTube videos, TikTok streams, Twitter hashtags, blogs, and to online fora to share experiences of being targeted by growing hostility and to seek pragmatic support and emotional solidarity through fundraising efforts and awareness-raising initiatives (Abidin & Zeng, 2021; Lee & Lee & 2023). Additionally, by showcasing their traditional cultural lifestyles, often visualised through popular social media props like food content, migrant creators act as conduits of intercultural knowledge between their host and home countries, through which they seek to enhance people’s civic awareness (Bao, 2021). 
These cross-cultural and cross-platform continuities and circulations have been further intensified by the networked affordances of various social media platforms, enabled through sharing, reposting, and responding features of newer platforms like TikTok, by diaspora and migrants around the world. This trend is also noticeable among young people outside of Southeast Asia who have developed a keen interest in local Asian cultures, driven by the rapid popularisation of popular culture and social media trends within today’s cosmopolitan social media environment (General, 2022; Putra, 2023). 
There is a growing body of scholarship on diasporic connections on social media, often called “e-diasporas”, “digital diasporas”, “virtual diasporas”, focusing on the practices and meanings of transnational sociality and affinity forged on online (Candidatu et al., 2019). However, little attention has been given to the Southeast Asian context, where such migrant practices arise from a complex interplay of colonial history, postcolonial desire, and the capitalist logics of evolving digital media environments, including emerging influencer ecologies. Some scholars have pioneered this area of study, looking at select Southeast Asian cases of the Philippines and Singapore and exploring migrants’ (im)mobility in today’s digital environment (Cabalquinto, 2022; Kaur-Gill, 2023). Nonetheless, more research is needed to understand the rapidly evolving landscape of social media, where global and region-specific socio-cultural, political-economic factors intersect to shape the norms, practices, and conditions of such transnationally mediated connections and intimacies forged through prominent social media channels and other users in migrant and diasporic settings. 
Against this backdrop, this PhD project further expands the growing body of scholarship on influencers, digital media, and migration, by paying particular attention to Southeast Asia. Proposed themes may consider, but are not limited to: mapping the genres of intercultural mediation on social media through forms of Influencer leadership and/or role modelling; uncovering the types of vernacular, cultural, and institutional knowledge being disseminated and circulated through forms of influencer narratives and performances; identifying the process of how influencer capital and/or status is constituted between the platform markets in the Southeast Asian region and beyond; tracing the dynamics and controversies of diaspora influencer embodiment and practices in cross-cultural contexts. 
References 
Abidin, C., & Zeng, J. (2021). Subtle Asian Traits and COVID-19: Congregating and commiserating as east Asians in a Facebook group. First Monday. 
Abidin, C., & Zeng, J. (2020). Feeling Asian together: Coping With #COVIDRacism on subtle Asian traits. Social media+ society, 6(3), 2056305120948223. 
Bao, H. (2021). Sharing food, vulnerability and intimacy in a global pandemic: The digital art of the Chinese diaspora in Europe. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 8(2-3), 129-145. 
Cabalquinto, E. C. B. (2022). (Im) mobile homes: Family life at a distance in the age of mobile media. Oxford University Press. 
Cabalquinto, E. C., & Soriano, C. R. R. (2020). ‘Hey, I like ur videos. Super relate!’Locating sisterhood in a postcolonial intimate public on YouTube. Information, communication & society, 23(6), 892-907. 
Candidatu, L., Leurs, K., & Ponzanesi, S. (2019). Digital diasporas: Beyond the buzzword: Toward a relational understanding of mobility and connectivity. The handbook of diasporas, media, and culture, 31-47. 
General, R. (2022). A remix of a Vietnamese pop hit has TikTok users dancing around the world. NextShark. https://nextshark.com/ting-ting-tang-tang-tang-tiktok-trend 
Kaur-Gill, S. (2023). The cultural customization of TikTok: Subaltern migrant workers and their digital cultures. Media International Australia, 186(1), 29-47. 
Lee, J., & Lee, C. S. (2022). ‘You betrayed us’: Ethnic celebrity gossip in diasporic women’s online communities. Convergence, 28(3), 613-628. 
Lee, J. J., & Lee, J. (2023). # StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearheading Counter-Narratives and Forming an Ad Hoc Asian Community. Social Media+ Society, 9(1), 20563051231157598. 
Leurs, K., & Ponzanesi, S. (2018). Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization. Popular communication, 16(1), 4-20. 
Putra, F. K. K., Putra, M. K., & Novianti, S. (2023). Taste of asean: traditional food images from Southeast Asian countries. Journal of Ethnic Foods, 10(1), 20.

 

Aims

In order to theorise ways to bring together academic and industry knowledge domains, this PhD project aims to explore the evolving ecology of Southeast Asian influencers in the specific context of diaspora, migration, and inter-cultural mobility. It is anticipated that findings from the study will inform how prolific creators like diaspora influencers shape and disrupt discourse about identity, socio-cultural milieus, and socio-political conditions in the time of rapid globalisation and late-stage capitalism.

 

Objectives

This PhD project has five objectives: 
1. To map out emerging issues and critical frameworks to understand the new field of diaspora influencers in the Southeast Asian region 
2. To develop innovative and ethical methodological tools that are designed to ethnographically interrogate specific research questions within particular contexts of the local, regional, vernacular, and the global, with a special focus on ethnography 
3. To identify missing gaps in existing scholarship on relevant topics and build theoretical frameworks that can address the missing gaps from an intersectional, de-westernised, interdisciplinary lens, based on critical thinking skills 
4. To establish new knowledge on the broader influencer industry, creator culture, and social media pop cultures 
5. To conduct research translation and application for project findings to impact the Southeast Asian influencer industry

 

Significance 

This PhD project will contribute to the scholarship of internet studies and media studies and may intersect with anthropology and sociology. The research focuses on the Southeast Asian context with a decolonial ethos to decentre the process of knowledge production and concentrate efforts on strengthening Australia's partnership with markets in the Indo-Pacific Ocean region.

 

This PhD project will be grounded in existing research strengths within MCASI and Curtin University. It will be housed within Influencer Ethnography Research Lab (IERLab) (https://ierlab.com/) where Professor Crystal Abidin is the founding director and Dr Jin Lee is a research fellow and core team member. IERLab comprises an interdisciplinary and international group of social scientists who study the socio-cultural impact of influencers. There is no external funding associated with this project. The candidate will benefit from both supervisors’ research expertise, including Prof Crystal's focus on influencer cultures and digital ethnography in the Asia Pacific region, and Dr Lee's focus on media intimacies and digital culture in East Asia. The candidate will hone their methodological skills, including digital ethnography and cross-cultural research, from IERLab’s strength in innovative and ethical methodologies with a cultural relativist ethos. This project is expected to adopt a localised, contextualised, and multilingual approach in line with the ethos of IERLab to prioritise internet research from the Asia Pacific region. It will also contribute to MCASI’s vision to encourage creative and critical reflection while engaging with relevant industries, by working closely with multiple stakeholders in the influencer industry and culture. The successful candidate will have a supportive research environment benefiting from the faculty research capacities as well as the broader IERLab network.

Student type

• Future Students

Faculty

• Faculty of Humanities

Course type

• Higher Degree by Research

Citizenship

• Australian Citizen
• Australian Permanent Resident
• New Zealand Citizen
• Permanent Humanitarian Visa
• International Student

Scholarship base

• Merit Based

Value

The annual scholarship package, covering both stipend and tuition fees, amounts to approximately $70,000 per year.

In 2024, the RTP stipend scholarship offers $35,000 per annum for a duration of up to three years. Exceptional progress and adherence to timelines may qualify students for a six-month completion scholarship.

Selection for these scholarships involves a competitive process, with shortlisted applicants notified of outcomes by November 2024.

Scholarship Details
Maximum number awarded

1

Eligible courses

All applicable HDR courses.

Eligibility criteria

Essential: English language IELTS level of 6.5 and above 
Essential: Successful completion of an Honours or Masters programme with a research component (or equivalent) 
Essential: Demonstration of competence in qualitative and ethnographic research methods/skills 
Essential: Interest in internet celebrity and influencer cultures, knowledge of social media and digital platforms in the Southeast Asian context, interest in internet cultures in the Asia Pacific context broadly 
Desirable: Bilingual competence in written and spoken English and at least one Asian language
 

Application process

Please send your CV, academic transcripts and brief rationale why you want to join this research project via the HDR expression of interest form to the project lead researcher, listed below. 

Enrolment Requirements

You must be enrolled in a Higher Degree by Research Course at Curtin University by March 2025.

Enquiries

Project Lead: Professor Crystal Abidin  

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