ACS Board Elections 2022 – Candidates’ statements

We invite ACS Members to vote in the election of the new board for years 2022-2026. In this election cycle, members will vote for the Chair and Vice Chair of the Association, and for Board members representing their designated geographic region.

The elections will be held electronically via Webropol from 8th March to 8th April. All individual members whose membership is valid for 2022 will receive personalized links via email through which they can cast their vote. The results of the elections will be announced in mid-April.

The ACS Bylaws state that the Board has one Chair and one Vice Chair, plus regional representatives as follows:
Africa – 3 (one from Southern Africa)
Asia – 4 (one from Northeast Asia, one from Southeast Asia, and one from South Asia)
Australia and New Zealand – 2
Europe – 4 (one from Northern Europe, one from Central and Eastern Europe, and one from Western and Southern Europe)
Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean – 4
North America and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean – 4

The bylaws state that the terms of service for Board members shall be staggered across two election cycles, so that each of the global regions described above except for Africa will choose half of its representatives every two years. Africa will choose 2 representatives in one election cycle (2022) and 1 representative in the other (2024). The elections for Chair and Vice Chair will be held during this election cycle, as the current Chair and Vice-Chair’s terms end in 2022.

Here are our candidates for the new Board (click on the name to view the candidate’s personal statement):

Chair
Ana Cristina Mendes (Portugal)*

Vice Chair
Helene Strauss (South Africa)*

*According to the bylaws, the Chair and Vice Chair also count as representatives of their respective regions. In this case, Ana Cristina Mendes represents Europe (elected in 2020 as a regional representative), and Helene Strauss will represent Africa.

Africa
Nedine Moonsamy (South Africa)

Asia
Daren Shi-chi Leung (Hong Kong)
Aljosa Puzar (South Korea)
Denise Tse-Shang Tang (Hong Kong)
Jian Xiao (China)

Austalia and New Zealand
Timothy Laurie (Australia)

Europe
Kris Rutten (Belgium)
Matthias Wieser (Austria)

Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean
Luiz Augusto Fernandez Rodrigues (Brazil)
Tomás Peters (Chile)

North America and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean
Gil Rodman (US)
Fan Yang (US)

Use your right to vote!

If you have any questions concerning the elections, please contact: info@cultstud.org

Candidates’ statements

Ana Cristina Mendes (Portugal)*

*standing for election as Chair, currently serving as a regional representative for Europe (2020-2024)

Ana Cristina Mendes uses cultural and postcolonial studies to examine literary and screen texts as venues for resistant knowledge formations to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice. She is an Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal (ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-0701). Her latest publications include articles in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies and Postcolonial Studies, and she is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-periphery. Since 2016, she has served as an elected Board member of the ACS, representing Europe, and has been involved in the ACS Virtual Lecture Series, which has been an exceptional place to make an impact in pandemic times by showcasing online the work of cutting-edge cultural studies theorists and practitioners. Over the past six years, she has benefitted immensely from the strong interdisciplinary and transnational connections offered by the ACS as a community of practice, and particularly from working closely with the committed members of the ACS Board.

If elected as Chair, you would continue to have her enthusiasm and dedication to promote and expand the ACS’s mission worldwide and reinforce the association’s standing as an effective transnational community of cultural studies. As a priority for the next four years, she envisions contributing to the strengthening of the interface between the research and teaching of cultural studies through initiatives such as the ACS Institute, in line with the transformational purposes of cultural studies as an intellectual and political project, and the ACS’s longstanding support of early-career researchers since its foundation in 2002. For fostering the ACS’s mission of connecting cultural studies scholars, practitioners, and students around the globe, additional key areas of intervention would be to identify potential synergies with other international research groups and encourage collaborations, and find new ways to deliver major ACS events so that they engage our community as much as possible.

Helene Strauss (South Africa)*
Department of English, University of the Free State

*standing for election as Vice Chair and a regional representative for Africa

I have been an active member of the Association for Cultural Studies since 2012, when I attended my first Crossroads conference in Paris. Since then, I have participated in each of the Crossroads conferences and ACS Institutes, served as the Local Director of the 2015 Institute in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and as a faculty member at the 2019 Institute at Zeppelin University, Germany. I have been a member of the ACS Executive Board as organizational secretary and one of the representatives for the Africa region since 2016. Since 2020, I have served as Vice-Chair. In the latter capacity, I have been part, for instance, of the core Organizing Team of the newly-formed ACS Virtual Lecture Series, and have been coordinating the conference committee.

My own research on a range of topics in African cultural studies has over the years been centrally concerned with expanding the field’s critical purview, and I have actively worked towards facilitating intellectual collaboration with other cultural studies scholars around the globe. Aside from hosting the 2015 ACS Institute, I co-organized, for instance, the John Douglas Taylor conference on “Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies” at McMaster University in Canada (2014), which brought together a range of established and emergent critical voices in the field, and has since yielded a sizeable body of published and ongoing collaborative work. My recent major research collaborations and publications include the books Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access, co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola (Routledge, 2017); co-edited special issues of the journals Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Safundi, and Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies; and participation in the “Affective Archives” project (2017-2020) convened by Derek Hook (Duquesne University) and Margarita Palacios (Birkbeck).

My current research includes a collaborative international project titled “Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding: The (In)humanities, Artistic Practices, and Planetary Crisis,” for which we host ongoing monthly symposia and plan a special issue of the journal Studies in Social Justice. I have published numerous book chapters and articles in venues such as Subjectivity, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Social Dynamics, Journal of African Cinemas, Wasafiri, Safundi, and English Academy Review, and serve on the Editorial Boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, English in Africa, and Journal of Literary Studies. My academic awards include a Canadian Governor General’s Gold Medal for my doctoral research; a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2009-2012); and two consecutive ratings from the South African National Research Foundation (2013-2024). I have supervised and examined a combined total of 44 MA, PhD and Postdoctoral students (38 completed).

If re-elected to the Board as Vice-Chair, and as a regional representative for Africa, I will continue to expand the Association’s African and global visibility and membership, an objective towards which I believe my work over the past 7 years has already made a significant contribution.

Nedine Moonsamy (South Africa)

Nedine Moonsamy is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Pretoria, and holds an NRF Y1 rating. She lectures and supervises on postcolonial literature and conducts research on contemporary South African Fiction and science fiction in Africa. Her monograph in progress is tentatively entitled ‘Crisis and Catharsis: Anodyne Narratives in Contemporary South African Fiction’ and deals with the future-orientedness of post-apartheid nationalism. The growing awareness of the importance of futurity eventually led to a second research interest on science fiction in Africa which examines how contemporary African authors navigate the tenuous politics of futurity, power, technology and representation when operating within the genre of science fiction. This project has led to her involvement in the Intra-Africa Mellon Focus Area research project on Urban Cultures and Popular Imaginaries in Africa (based at Rhodes University), workshops on AI in Africa (HSRC AND Oxford University) and popular African cinema (SOAS). She has held research fellowships at The Institute for African and Asian Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin (2017), at the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2019) and at STIAS, Stellenbosch (2020). She currently serves on the editorial board of Imbizo: International Journal of Literary and Comparative Studies and SAFUNDI: the Journal of South African and American Studies. Her debut novel, The Unfamous Five (Modjaji Books, 2019) was shortlisted for the HSS Fiction Award (2021), and her poetry was shortlisted for the inaugural New Contrast National Poetry Award (2021). Her photography was exhibited as part of a project on trans-subjectivity in Africa at the AFEMS Conference (Wits University, 2019) and abroad.

Daren Shi-chi LEUNG (Hong Kong)
Cultural Studies, Lingnan University

I am an early-career researcher and an activist committed to using my academic training and community-based experience to advance discourses of change. I received my PhD from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney in 2021. My research interest focuses on new materialism at the intersection of the politics of food and farming, civic participation, and sustainability. My thesis, “Farming as Method: Contextualizing the politics of food and farming in South China”, in a way, expresses my intellectual and activist concerns in environmental cultural politics. In the process of writing it, I was taken back to my mother’s fascinating story of Mao’s China as well as that of my village under rapid transformation over the century. I returned to Hong Kong in mid-2021 to join my alma mater, Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, to work as Research Assistant Professor. At Lingnan, I have been busy working on projects in developing urban commons.

This intellectual trajectory, based on a combination of cultural theory, historical documentation, and personal experience, covers a geography including Australia, Hong Kong and Mainland China. Fluent in both Cantonese and Putonghua, I am capable of liaising with various communities in the greater China region, including diasporas. In addition, having been active in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies network for a number of years, I enjoy engaging in a variety of ongoing and emerging intellectual debates with other senior and junior Asia-based cohorts.

If elected as the regional representative of Asia, I plan to develop more early-career support programs and activities, such as a summer institute catering to emerging topics of concern, developing a cross-national mentoring program, forming clusters of work groups to create clear focuses in transnational cultural studies, etc. I of course hope to learn from other regional representatives, and many members of ACS, to share our aspirations.

ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5415-0691
Institutional page: https://www.ln.edu.hk/cultural/staff/leung-shi-chi/index.php

Aljosa Puzar (South Korea)

Dear colleagues,
My name is Aljosa Puzar (Aljoša Pužar) and I am a cultural studies scholar, urban anthropologist, social critic, and writer (a mediocre poet), of mixed roots, born in Yugoslavia. Defended my first Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Rijeka with a project about the anthropological and cultural theory of in-betweenness, and my second one in 2015 at Cardiff University with a project in Korean youth studies. From 2002 I taught translation studies at the University of Trieste in Italy, from 2003 literary theory and cultural studies at the University of Rijeka in Croatia, and between 2006 and 2016 cultural geography, gender studies, cultural anthropology, etc. at South Korean universities (HUFS, Yonsei). Since 2017, I have been teaching cultural studies and urban anthropology at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and (from 2019) cultural analysis at the University of Arts, Berlin (UDK). With my Asian and European partners, I am also running a small cultural trends observatory specializing in Asian cultures (EUACTO). In the past, I have contributed to various cultural studies activities, journals, and professional organizations in Croatia and South Korea. That included starting and co-writing cultural studies university programs and presiding over local cultural studies associations. I am presently working on establishing the Balkans cultural studies network and pushing for the better representation of the cultural studies practitioners from the post-communist East Europe and Central Asia in international cultural studies. I see myself as representing non-metropolitan people that are from nowhere in particular, people on the move, or those with multiple belongings. I was honored to be one of the representatives of Asia on the Board of the ACS in the past mandate and have decided to run again as I would like to keep contributing to the best of my abilities to our association’s activities also after these two years of the pandemic interruptions, postponements, and halts. Thank you all for your camaraderie and trust.

Academia.edu: https://uni-lj.academia.edu/AljosaPuzar
ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5931-7577

Denise Tse-Shang Tang (Hong Kong)
Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University

My main interests are in the areas of gender studies and sexuality studies. I am seeking to be a representative of Association for Cultural Studies’ Asia constituency. By joining the Board of Association for Cultural Studies, I intend to continue my intellectual engagement with cultural studies through rigorous research, forging international collaborations, organizing institutes and conferences. It is my long term career goal to develop alternative theoretical approaches to understanding new paradigms of gender and sexualities in cultural studies with an inter-Asian perspective. I began my doctoral research as a sociologist on Chinese gender and sexualities under Travis S.K. Kong then at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. After more than a decade of professional work in North American-based social services organization, I made the decision to return to Hong Kong for my doctoral studies. In 2003-07, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Hong Kong lesbian communities and investigated the relationship between sexual identity and social spaces. My first book Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life (2011) is based on my doctoral research.

Upon graduation, I joined the Graduate Institute of Gender Studies at Shih Hsin University, Taiwan. The focus of the Institute is on teaching full-time Master’s students in Gender Studies. In 2010, I organized a panel on LGBT cultural productions for the 8th Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, held at Lingnan University. I was also involved as a Board Member (7th CSA Board) with the Cultural Studies Association in Taiwan and edited the Association’s Cultural Studies Quarterly. In 2011-18, I worked at the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong and developed research directions on social media, ageing and older lesbians / bisexual women.

Since joining the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in 2018, I have been able to capitalize on its extensive inter-Asia connections to develop new research projects on transgender men (Hong Kong and Thailand), marriage equality (Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan), human rights (Japan and Hong Kong). A book manuscript tentatively titled, Everyday Erotics: Ethnographies of Older Lesbians and Bisexual Women in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan is currently under contract with Duke University Press. In this second book, I aim to demonstrate that the unpacking of the social, cultural, and historical meanings of being an older lesbian or bisexual woman is crucial to building a genealogy of sexualities. In 2020, I embarked on a new research direction with the formation of transgender men identities in everyday life in Hong Kong and Thailand. I am currently the Program Director for the Master’s of Cultural Studies programme and Associate Dean in Teaching and Learning. Coming from Hong Kong at this moment, I hope to contribute to ACS by breaking new grounds in uncommon locations.

Website: https://www.ln.edu.hk/cultural/staff/tang-tse-shang/index.php

Jian Xiao (China)

I am Jian Xiao (Ph.D. Loughborough University), the associate professor at Zhejiang University, China, a research fellow in public culture at the University of Melbourne, and the academic chair of Qingyun research institute. I am an established researcher in the fields of media and cultural studies, and have published widely in journals that include European Journal of Cultural Studies, Space and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Urban Affairs, Information, Communication and Society, International Journal of Communication, Chinese Journal of Communication, etc. I have also published a monograph “Punk Culture in Contemporary China” with Palgrave MacMillan and “Image-City-History: The Transformation and Reinvention of Shenzhen since 1891”. Specifically, my work focuses on “power” and the relationship between “the mainstream” and “the edge” by looking at the construction of cultural and digital platforms in the context of globalisation and “de-westernisation”, as well as the construction process of creative culture system in small cities and rural areas in China.

In 2021, I initiated an international forum “Art and cosmopolitanism in the digital area ” with Melbourne University, and invited scholars such as Nikos Papastergiadis and internationally famous curator Hanru Hou, and a course exhibition “”The Black Box and Media History” participated by the students, inspiring them to be creative. From 2019, I am also active in liaising with artists, architects, investors and government officials, developing more creative strategic skills and enriching the overall understanding of traditional culture and modern culture.

Within a changing world as the quantitative market economy and network technology deepen, the deeper the sense of powerlessness that surrounds people, the more a society needs to develop self-understanding. In the face of such a reality, the more carefully and clearly we observe and record, the more deeply we can analyse people’s way of life. More importantly, what kind of cultural studies should be based on the “culture” of record and analysis? Here, the methods of cultural studies need to be re-examined and its scope needs to be further widened. More importantly, particularly in these difficult times of growing divisions, cultural studies can be as unifying force both among scholars and in terms of understanding culture and the contradictory forces driving both divisiveness and cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, populism, nationalism etc as embedded in popular culture. Thus, I hope to be a representative of Asia, and add creative input in terms of developing cultural studies according to its changing social contexts. This thought has further developed following my participation in the 2018 Crossroads conference in Shanghai. Integrating China into the wider cultural studies community, the conference has become a platform for the interactions between Asia and the non-Asian contexts. Based on this previous success, I hope, the collaboration can be more vibrant, not only in the form of the official conference, but also through encouraging and supporting new directions in scholarship to enhance the discipline’s standing via its detailed insights into the status of society, and via workshops or talks as well as appropriate virtual collaborations to further exchange ideas.

Website: https://person.zju.edu.cn/en/jianxiao

Timothy Laurie (Australia)

Timothy Laurie is a Senior Lecturer and the Higher Degree Research Coordinator in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. He is currently working on three research projects: first, he is examining discourses around boyhood and youth in Australian cinema, as part of his role as a Chief Investigator on the Australia Research Council Grant, Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem (2021-2023); second, he is continuing research on coupledom, marriage equality, and family diversity with co-authored Hannah Stark, with whom he recently published a monograph, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures (Palgrave, 2021); and third, he is collaborating with Liam Grealy on a qualitative research project into higher degree research training programs and supervision practices.

Timothy has a long-term commitment to building cultural studies research networks and collaborations in the Australia and New Zealand region. He has supported Early Career Researchers and postgraduates through co-editing numerous on issues showcasing cultural studies approaches to complex cultural and political debates, including co-editing with Tanja Dreher and Michael Griffiths the book collection Unsettled Voices: Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era (Routledge, 2021), and ongoing his work as Editor for Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2017-present). Timothy has also co-organised with Rimi Khan the 2015 conference for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, and with Hannah Stark, the 2017 conference for Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy. He has also served on the Executive Board for the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (ICAS 2017-2019).

Through working with the Association for Cultural Studies, Timothy hopes to help the organisation develop stronger interdisciplinary relationships with researchers in Australia and New Zealand. In particular, he would like to help postgraduates and ECRs to find intellectual ‘homes’ in cultural studies communities, both through expanding opportunities for publishing in cultural studies journals, and through organising events, seminars, and workshops relating to contemporary cultural studies research.

UTS Profile: https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Timothy.Laurie
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3453-775X
Academia.edu: https://uts.academia.edu/TimothyLaurie
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Timothy-Laurie
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ccon20

Kris Rutten (Belgium)

Hereby I would like to confirm my engagement to stand for the ACS Board elections for a second period as a regional representative for Europe.

I work as an associate professor at the Department of Educational Studies of Ghent University where I lead the research group Culture & Education (https://www.ugent.be/pp/onderwijskunde/ce/en). I have a backgound in Art History and Comparative Cultural Studies and obtained a PhD in Educational Sciences with a dissertation on the rhetorical and narrative turn in education. I currently also serve as associate editor of the academic journal Critical Arts. South-North Cultural and Media Studies. My fields of expertise are: the rhetorical curriculum, the rhetoric of cultural literacy, the ethnographic turn in the arts and the pedagogical role of cultural institutions.

I am lecturer-in-charge for the BA courses Anthropology and Culture and education, the MA course Cultural Studies and the academic teacher training course Culture, Media and Education. I am the president of the Rhetoric Society of Europe (RSE), vice-president of the Kenneth Burke Society (KBS) and out-going Board member of the International Association for Cultural Studies (ACS). I am also the president of the Flemish Reading Foundation (Iedereen Leest). I received the KBS Emerging Scholar Award at the 9th triennial conference of the Kenneth Burke Society (St. Louis, July 2014).

Based on the above I am confident that I have the necessary expertise and service experience to serve on the ACS Board for second term.

Matthias Wieser (Austria)

Matthias Wieser is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications and Head of the University Cultural Centre (UNIKUM) at the University of Klagenfurt (AT). After studying Sociology, History and German Philology at the RWTH Aachen University (DE), he received his MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London (GB), his PhD in Sociology and his “venia” in Media and Communications both from the University of Klagenfurt. Before joining Klagenfurt he was Lecturer in the Department of Sociology of RWTH Aachen University. Further he has been Visiting Fellow at the Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University Montreal (CA) and at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney (AU) and Guest Professor at the Institute of Media Studies, University of Tuebingen (DE). His focus in research and teaching is at the crossroads of Cultural Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies. In 2013 he was co-organizer of the ACS Institute “Sights/Sites of Cultural Studies” in Klagenfurt.

Luiz Augusto Fernandez Rodrigues (Brazil)

I’m a professor of the Art Department of Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Brazil, linked to the undergraduate course in Cultural Production and Graduate Program in Culture and Territorialities. I hold a degree in Architecture and Urbanism and a Doctorate in History. I’ve been working in the area of Politics and Cultural Management, having as lines of research topics such as: cultural management, public policies of culture, city and culture, modernity and university space. I coordinate the Laboratory of Cultural Actions -LABAC/UFF (https://labacuff.wordpress.com/), and I’m the editor of PragMATIZES – Latin American Journal of Cultural Studies (https://periodicos.uff.br/pragmatizes/). I have been an active member of the Cultural Policies and Cultural management group in Brazil, extending my links with Latin America.

More informations: ORCID profile https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0583-9641 – https://lattes.cnpq.br/0830481590492018

Tomás Peters (Chile)
University of Chile

I am an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Instituto de la Comunicación e Imagen (ICEI) of the Universidad de Chile and have been attending a number of congresses and seminars on Latin American Cultural Studies during the last fifteen years. Over that period, I have seen not only the increasing importance of the participation of Latin American colleagues in these meetings, but also the relevance of discussing the role of Latin American critical thinking in the global milieu. As a regional representative for Latin America in the Association for Cultural Studies, my commitment will be to build a community of Latin American researchers and academics looking for more equality and diversity of issues of the region considered inside the ACS, as well as continuing to experiment with more voices and critical perspectives from Latin America.

My current research is concerned with the study of cultural management and policy in Latin America. However, I have worked on a range of research projects, including social inequality, education, time and society, social impact of the arts, museum studies and cultural diversity. In order to improve and increase the connection with colleagues around the region and globally, I would like to share new ideas and debates on the problems and challenges caused by COVID-19 and the current —and historical— inequality and political crisis in Latin America. Such collaboration can forge connections vital to the survival of the Latin American Cultural Studies and the strengthening of the humanities in the coming years. I would hope to promote and reward scholarly excellence across the full range of our subject, as well as a social compromise with our people.

And about my CV, I am a cultural sociologist based in Santiago, Chile and I have a PhD in Cultural Studies from the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London. My main areas of research include cultural studies, sociology of art, Latin American studies and cultural policy. I have been visiting researcher at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut zu Berlin (2015 and 2018) and visiting professor at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the Instituto de la Comunicación e Imagen (ICEI) of the Universidad de Chile and President of the International Institute for Philosophy and Social Studies based in Santiago, Chile. My last book is titled “Sociología(s) del arte y de las políticas culturales” (Editorial Metales Pesados).

CV and publications: https://birkbeck.academia.edu/TomasPeters

Gil Rodman (USA)
Communication Studies, University of Minnesota

Cultural studies has served as my primary intellectual home for more than 30 years. For me, that commitment involves more than just teaching cultural studies and doing cultural studies research, though I’ve done plenty of both (for more details, please see my website: http://www.gilrodman.com). It also involves doing the sort of “backstage” labor necessary to create and maintain spaces where other people can practice cultural studies. In this spirit, I’ve served as the founder/manager of CULTSTUD-L (the largest and longest-running international listserv for cultural studies, 1996-present); as book review editor for Cultural Studies (the longest-running international journal for cultural studies, 2000-2011); and as both Vice Chair (2008-2010) and Chair (2010-2016) of the ACS.

When Stephen Chan took over as ACS Chair in 2016, in accordance with the Association’s bylaws, I was “co-opted” back onto the Board in an advisory, non-voting capacity, and I have remained active in the Board’s discussions and deliberations ever since. When COVID-19 forced us to postpone/cancel our major face-to-face events (the Crossroads conference and the Institute), I wound up chairing the committee that has organized the monthly ACS Virtual Lecture Series that began in May 2021. Given how actively I have remained involved in the “backstage” work of the ACS, even after I stepped down as Chair, it seemed appropriate that I stand for election so that I might “return” to the Board I’ve never fully left, only this time as a regular member.

Fan Yang (USA)

Fan Yang （杨帆） is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She has been an ACS Board member since January 2017, representing North America and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. If re-elected, she hopes to further promote boundary-crossing activities and intellectual exchanges that enrich cultural studies in a global context.

Yang’s scholarship lies at the intersection of transnational media studies, globalization and communication, postcolonial studies, and contemporary China. She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2016). Her work on cultural studies, globalization, Chinese media, and urban communication has appeared in Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, positions: asia critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Communication+1, Environmental Humanities, among others.

Yang’s second monograph, entitled Disorienting Politics: Rising China and Chimerican Media, is currently under review. It calls for a relational politics predicated on a deeper acknowledgment of the economic, political, cultural, and ecological entanglements of the two “superpowers” (i.e. China and the US). She is also at work on a new project, Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South, which examines the first Special Economic Zone located in southern China as a media-architectural nexus that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.”

A native of Hangzhou, China, Yang lived in different regions within China before moving to the US in 2000 for a Master’s degree at the Ohio State University. She became a member of the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) in 2010, a year before she finished her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University – the first stand-alone Ph.D. program of this kind in the U.S. – where she was the recipient of a High Potential Fellowship. Yang has participated as a presenter and panel organizer at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conferences in Hong Kong (2010), Paris (2012), and Tampere (2014). After attending the second ACS Institute in Klagenfurt, Austria in 2013, Yang went on to direct a seminar, “China and/in Globalization,” at the following institute in Bloemfontein, South Africa in December, 2015.

In all of these events and many others, Yang has built and facilitated alliances among scholars from different nations and continents as well as disciplines. A recent example of this is her role as a leader and organizer for the “One Belt, One Road” track of a conference co-organized by the National Communication Association in the US and the Communication University of China in 2021. She is currently working with scholars from China, South Africa, Russia, Australia, and the US on an edited volume that provides a cultural studies perspective on this major development initiative launched by China in 2013. Committed to efforts of this kind, Yang will seek to expand the ACS’s role as an important node for nurturing transnational and transdisciplinary networks.

Institutional page: http://mcs.umbc.edu/fan-yang/
Academia.edu: https://umbc.academia.edu/FanYang