Narrating Chinese Youth Mobilities

He Zhang is a lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication at Northwest University in China. She earned her PhD in Media Studies from Curtin University, Australia. Her areas of interest include participatory practices, youth mobilities, and intercultural communication. Qian Gong is a senior lecturer at Curtin University, Australia. She researches Chinese media and popular culture. She is also the co-editor of Linguistic Diversity and Discrimination: Autoethnographies from Women in Academia (Routledge, 2023).

"In this judicious and readable study, Zhang and Gong explain where Digital Storytelling comes from, why it matters, and how to do it. They introduce it to China, reinventing it as a powerful pedagogical tool for the algorithmic era, because everyone is an outsider sometimes."John Hartley, University of Sydney, Australia“He Zhang’s and Qian Gong’s well written exposition of their engaging and revealing digital storytelling work with migrant Chinese students, demonstrates only too well the value of making and sharing-in-the-flesh considered narratives, both as ‘tools for conviviality’ (Illich) and as another way of ‘being in the truth’ (Hoggart).”Daniel Meadows PhD, creative director, BBC Capture Wales (2001-2006)“Delivering rich understanding of experiences of migration in China and Australia, this important study details how radical workshop-based digital storytelling remains impactful, as practice and as research, at a time when privately owned corporations offer myriad possibilities for self-representation, but not often for reflection, listening and creativity, off and online.”Nancy Thumim, University of Leeds, UK

• 1. Introduction: Digital Storytelling, Mobility, and Media Citizenship 2. Conceptualising Digital Storytelling as Practice and Method 3. Designing the Research 4. Narrating Transnationality by Chinese Young People in Australia 5. Reskilling through Self-representation: Empowering Chinese International Students through Digital Storytelling 6. The First Trial of the Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Migrants in China 7. Autobiographical Storytelling as Counter-Narrative to the Myth of “the South” 8. Is It Worth It?: Youth Mobility and the Consumption of International Higher Education by the Chinese Middle Class 9. Conclusion