Joey Chan

Profile

I completed my PhD in University of Leeds in late 2022, with funding from School of Media and Communication, Gilchrist Educational Trust, and University of Leeds. 

In my PhD, I examined the ‘look and feel’ of women’s empowerment in ‘pro-woman advertising’ and the production of this genre in the transnational advertising industry in Mainland China. Specifically, through an intersectional feminist lens, and social semiotic and multi-sited ethnographic approaches, I traced the visual aesthetics of womanhood and feminism in these promotional texts, and how and why certain feelings and ideas are translated into images and objects in the advertising industry. 

I am currently preparing outputs based on this doctoral study, and developing my next project on popular ‘feminist’ images.

Before this post, I taught in School of Media and Communication (Leeds) and University of Hong Kong. In HKU, I was also Research Assistant in Department of Sociology in several projects about the cultural industries and labour, migration, and gender and sexuality in Hong Kong and East Asia. Previously, I had worked in marketing and market research in Hong Kong and China.

Research interests

Broadly, my research agenda is driven by the overarching theme of what social and cultural identities, equities, and inequities may ‘look and feel’ like, what this means politically, and how and why these meanings are made and shaped into the text. I am most interested in the communication of sentiments surrounding feminism, womanhood, and gender, the communicative potential of sensuous elements in visual and multimodal designs, and overall, the political economy of their aesthetics. To study these, I specialise in social semiotics and employ intersectional and postcolonial feminist analytical frameworks and ethnographic approaches.

Areas of expertise

• Social semiotics
• Visual and multimodal communication
• Gender and feminisms
• Feminisms in China 
• Intersectional feminisms 
• Postcolonial feminisms
• Business thinking in marketing 
• ‘Pro-woman’ and ‘feminist’ marketing and design
• Chinese advertising industry
• Promotional culture 

Research interests

• Look and feel of womanhood and feminism
• Intersection between gender, class, and race in visual and multimodal communication
• Textures and colours 
• Marketing and design
• Illustration 
• Marketing and advertising industries

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

• PhD Media and Communication
• MA International Communication
• BBA Marketing and Accounting

Professional memberships

• Associate Fellowship, Advance HE

Student education

I teach across a range of undergraduate and postgratuate modules in the School.

<h4>Postgraduate research opportunities</h4> <p>We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our <a href="https://phd.leeds.ac.uk">research opportunities</a> allow you to search for projects and scholarships.</p>