Transmedia Practices as Social Remittances: A Case Study of an Undergraduate International Student From China

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Living and Learning in the Digital Age: Exploring the Tensions and Possibilities of Transmedia Activity

Abstract

Objectives
The paper presented in this symposium is part of a larger and ongoing ethnographic project focused on the living and learning experiences of eight undergraduate Chinese international students in the U.S. In the paper, I adopt a case study approach (Yin, 2003) to illustrate 1) the transmedia practices that one of the focal students is actively engaged within his daily life, and 2) the affordances of the transmedia practices leveraged by the student to (re)negotiate his learning, agency, and identities in a transnational milieu.

Perspectives
The student featured in the case study is a rising senior enrolled in a large public research university on the West Coast. Over a period of 12 months, I followed and documented the transmedia practices of the student as he navigated his everyday living and learning vis-à-vis a network of digitally- and analogically-mediated activities identified in both academic and non-academic domains. In what follows, I offer an account of the students’ transmedia practices in reference to three ethnographic datasets that I constructed through the year-long field research.

Methods
The first dataset of the study consisted of a collection of literacy artifacts created by the student through his coursework, which included, among others, writing assignments, reading notes, and presentations delivered during in-class discussion activities (with audio recordings). The second dataset of the study attended to the student’s involvement in a publicly accessible instant messaging (IM) platform based in China, which was created by an online ACG[1] community. As a huge fan of the ACG culture himself, the student described the IM platform as a primary communication channel that tied himself back to the everyday realities of his home country. With regard to the third dataset of the study, I advanced the exploratory endeavor by focusing specifically on the student’s self-reflections of his transnational experiences, which was facilitated by the “photovoice” techniques (Mitchell, 2011; Wang & Burris, 1997) widely adopted in community-based participatory research. In our bi-weekly meetings, I recorded stories shared by the student concerning photographs that he took in the service of expressing what he perceived and experienced as an undergraduate Chinese international student in the U.S.

Results/Scholarly Significance
Building on both qualitative content and thematic analysis conducted within and across the datasets, I argued that what underpinned the student’s transmedia practices was a complex web of people, artifacts, modalities, discourses, and contexts (re)connected by material and symbolic ties in fluctuating ways. In view of the transnational nature of the student’s living and learning experiences, I further proposed that the observed transmedia practices can be considered an embodiment of Levitt’s (1998, 2015) notion of “social remittances”, which foregrounded the circulation and resignification of ideas, practices, identities, and social capital mediated through the student’s transnational movement and the “home-host” dynamics involved therein.

Author

• Peng Yin, Berkeley University of California