Ran Wang

Ran Wang’s work takes a sociological approach to unpack the institution of digital censorship, shaped by the state, platforms, and users, and examines its impacts on culture and cultural production.

Ran Wang is a joint doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on the interaction between censorship and digital culture, particularly cultural production. Using the Chinese fandom as the case study, her work unpacks how the state, platforms, and users collectively create and sustain digital censorship as a dynamic negotiation of power rather than a top-down monolithic oppression-resistance model. By analyzing how users understand their everyday interactions with censorship, she aims to acknowledge individual agency and value the alternative knowledge produced within communities about opaque censorship. Beyond the topic of censorship, Ran is also interested in the connection between fandom cultural production and other cultural phenomenon including cyber-nationalism and digital feminism.