Dr Siao Yuong Fong

Profile

I joined Lancaster University as Lecturer of Global Media and Inequality in September 2021 and work at the intersections of Media and Cultural Studies, Production Studies and Asian Studies. I was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. While at ARI, I worked on developing my first monograph on authoritarian resilience in the media based on an immersive production ethnography of Singaporean television producers. The book focuses on the role of affect and imagined audiences in the study of authoritarian resilience. As one of the very few Asian media production ethnographies with a sociological and political focus, it offers insight into the important and often invisible everyday work that goes into maintaining regime stability in a context whereby political upheaval is far from the popular imagination. The book, titled Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal democracy, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2022 and can be found here (ebook) and here (hardcover).

The new research I am developing explores how power manifest in contexts where potential cultural imperialization comes from those of the same ethnicity. I explore these in relation to the translocal media production links between China and the Southeast Asian Sinosphere.