Dechun Zhang

My name is Dechun Zhang, and I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Tracking and Society in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. I am working on the ERC Advanced Grant project "GREENWATCH – Green Surveillance: Imagining a Sustainable Internet of Things," focusing on IoT applications for environmental monitoring and their ethical and political implications, with PI Prof. Dr. Klaus Bruhn Jensen. My research interests are political communication, media and politics, digital politics, digital propaganda, online particpation and digital nationalism. I conduct research through both qualitative, quantitative and computational methodological approaches. I am currently working on my book manuscript based on my PhD thesis, Echoes of Nationalism: Digital Propaganda and Online Participation on Weibo during COVID-19, under contract with Routledge.

I am currently an affiliated researcher at the Leiden Asia Centre at Leiden University in the Netherlands. I am now the Managing Editor at the Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Editor at the Asia Pacific Viewpoint & Sage Open and the Social Media Editor at the Journal of Visual Political Communication. I serve as a reviewer for various journals and conferences and act as an External Expert, evaluating proposals for the COST Action, which is part of The European Cooperation in Science and Technology. My studies also appear in serval journals, book chapters and conferences, including Journalism Practice, etc. You can check my updated CV here.

I was a visiting researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Political and Social Science at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany (host by Prof. Dr. Barbara Pfetsch). I completed my PhD at Leiden University, focusing on China's digital nationalism. I received my joint master degree from the Erasmus Mundus program in Journalism Media and Globalisation at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Amsterdam in Netherlands, with a research track in media and politics. Also, I received my bachelor (Honors) degree from Hong Kong Baptist University in International Journalism.