Academic interests
Digital disconnection, screen cultures, digital and social media, smartphone apps, gamification, self-regulation cultures, media audiences/users, media engagement, domestication theory, surveillance, technology affordances, etc.
Background
Yukun studied advertising and media and communication from marketing and academic perspectives. Driven by interest in digital health and user studies, Yukun wrote her Master's thesis on gamification of sleep, based on a user study of a gameful sleep-regulating app (SleepTown). By taking a closer look at users' diverse engagement with the app in the physical and virtual space, light was shed on the prevailing self-optimization cultures in China and the transformation of the meaning of sleep in a digital age.
To develop her research interest in digital media and self-regulation cultures, Yukun chose to do a doctoral research on the digitalization and gamification of digital detox. Here digital detox means the voluntary and intended disconnecting from specific online platforms, contents, people, devices, or limiting digital involvement in general. By focusing on the production and reception of digital detox technologies (e.g., productivity apps and screen-time management tools), she wants to look into how people understand and deal with the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon, that is, doing digital detox through digital media (even digital games), so as to better understand the ambivalence and tensions of people's digital media use, overuse and non-use in media-saturated societies.
Education
Master of Science, Media and Communication Studies, Lund University, Sweden, 09/2018-06/2020
Erasmus Exchange Programme, Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 09/2019-01/2020
Bachelor of Arts, Advertising, Shanghai University, China, 09/2014-06/2018
Awards
- Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020, Media and Communication Studies, Lund University