Xiaohongshu as an Infrastructure of a Globalising China: Wanghong, Food, and Displacement
- i-comcul
- Sep 30
- 2 min read
Carwyn Morris
Senior Lecturer in Digital Society and Geography in the Department of Media Studies, SOAS
November 13, 2025 (Thu)
18:00-19:30 (JST) at Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University
Hybrid / No registration required
Meeting ID: 931 2154 7473
Passcode: ICCfood
This talk attends to emerging geographies in the U.S. and Europe that are increasingly entangled with Chinese immigrants, capital, cultures, and lived experiences. We center the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu (RedNote) as a digital infrastructure in mediating and spatializing wanghong (internet famous) phenomena and China's culture. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldworks in Düsseldorf and New York City, we highlight Xiaohongshu’s
platform affordances and specific user practices that triangulate people, places, and business practices outside of PRC. Together, we contribute a lens of digital infrastructure to approach global China as empirical phenomena and an analytic of power relations. In doing this, we contextualize and reflect on the social media platform in the context of diasporic place making, exploring how social media both places and displaces diasporic communities.
Carwyn Morris is Senior Lecturer in Digital Society and Geography in the Department of Media Studies, SOAS University of London. Carwyn's research focuses on the impact China has on digital societies, and he is interested in wanghong (网红, internet fame), digital territory, the cultural industries, digital activism, and the impact of Chinese social media around the world. Carwyn graduated with a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the LSE. Prior to working at SOAS he was a University Lecturer of Digital China at Leiden University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Manchester. Carwyn previously worked as a brand strategist and he remains active in the world of fashion through an ongoing collaboration with the artisan fashion brand, seventyfive.
This series is organized by James Farrer (Professor of Sociology, Sophia University) and the ICC Collaborative Research Unit “Sophia Food Studies: Mobilities, Sustainability and Ethics.”
