Assistant Professor

E: siyuan_yin@sfu.ca
Room: K9656

Siyuan Yin

Siyuan Yin is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Siyuan engages in interdisciplinary scholarship spanning the fields of cultural and media studies, feminist studies, social movements, and political economy. Her research centers on social inequalities and resistance in the process of migration and globalization, and specifically, she explores how media, culture, and technologies have become sites for the production and reproduction of hegemonic power and, at the same time, within which agents, institutions, and communities can thrive and resist amid tension and friction. Siyuan received the 2022 Herbert Schiller Award at IAMCR. Her current projects include migrant workers, labor activism, feminist movements, and gendered popular culture.

Education

  • PhD University of Massachusetts Amherst (Communication)
  • Graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies
  • MA University of Illinois Chicago (Communication)
  • BA Peking University, China (Journalism) Minor: Philosophy

Currently Teaching

Courses

Future courses may be subject to change.

publications

Books

Upcoming Book

Coming May 2025

Selected Journal Articles

Yin, S. (2024). “Patriotic heroes” and “foreign laborers”: Politics of media and public discourses on essential workers and migrant workers in Canada during the Covid-19. International Journal of Communication 18, pp. 4962-4988. Https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/21805/4835

Siyuan Yin. (2023). Situating platform gig economy in the formal subsumption of reproductive labor: Transnational migrant domestic workers and the continuum of exploitation and precarity. https://doi.org/10.1177/03098168221145407

Yu Sun & Siyuan Yin. (2022). Opening up mediation opportunities by engaging grassroots data: Adaptive and resilient feminist data activism in China. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221096806

Yin, S. (2021). Re-articulating feminisms: a theoretical critique of feminist struggles and discourse in historical and contemporary ChinaCultural Studies.

Siyuan Yin. (2021). Towards a Marxist Critique of the Political Economy of Migration and the Media. triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, Vol 19, No 1.

Yin, S. (2020). Cultural production in the working-class resistance: labour activism, gender politics, and solidarities.  Cultural Studies. Volume 43, Issue 3. pp. 418-441.  

Siyuan Yin & Yu Sun. (2020). Intersectional digital feminism: assessing the participation politics and impact of the MeToo movement in China. Feminist Media Studies.   

Yin, S. (2018). Alternative forms of media, ICTs and underprivileged groups in China, Media, Culture & Society. vol. 40, 8: pp. 1221-1236

Yin, S. (2016). Producing gendered migration narratives in China: A case study of Dagongmei Tongxun by a local nongovernment organization International Journal of Communication, 10 (20).

Book Reviews

Siyuan Yin. (2020). Media, politics, and ideologies in contemporary ChinaGlobal Media and China.

Yin, S. Immobile Mobility: Young Migrant Women in Contemporary China. Information   Technologies & International Development, 10(1), 31–33, Spring 2014. Reviewed Book: Cara Wallis, Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2013, 264 pp., $40.05 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8147-9526-2. 

 

Recent Engagements

“Feminist theories and struggles”, 2022 Summer School at the School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, August 8, 2022, online.

“Platform gig economy and reproductive labor in capitalist globalization”, an annual forum of Communication and the Public “Revisiting Politics & Poetics of Digital Transformation”, Zhengjiang University, Hangzhou, China, July 1, 2022, online. 

“Re-articulating feminisms in contemporary China”, symposium “Issues in Modern China”, School of Marxism, Southeast University, Nanjing, China, May 24, 2021, online.

 “Doing engaged scholarship”, roundtable “Looking back, looking forward: Media and communication studies”, School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University, Beijing, China, May 26, 2021, Online.

“Digital feminism in China: Social media as sites of contestation over feminisms”, Digital Age Symposium, University of Kansas, April 2025, online.

“A feminist critique of labor and technology in the platform economy”, the Fung Global Fellows Program, Princeton University, April 2024.

research

Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Social Movements, Alternative Media, Global Digital Media, China Studies.

SUPERVISION

  • Mingmin Gu, PhD candidate, "Youth Precarity in China: The Lives of the Young Superfluous". 

  • Alicia Massie, PhD candidate, "The Administrative Machine: Power, Precarity, and People in Canada's Caregiver Pilots, 2019-2024". 

  • Amna Ali, PhD student, "Combating Sexual Violence in Pakistan: Exploring the Formation of the Feminist Online Publics". 

  • Yameena Zaidi, MA student, "Putting Strategies in their Place: Mapping and Historicizing the Indian Gig Workers Movement". 

  • Monica Yousofi, MA student, "The Subaltern Speaking Up Transnationally: Digital Activism by Afghan Refugees in Canada". 

  • Katya Letunovskaya, MA student, "Transnational Migration, Gendered Labour, and Resistance: Domestic Migrant Workers in Lebanon's Kafala System". 

  • Ana Contretas Frias, MA student, "The Angry Women Manifesto".

  • Melanie Qian, MA, "Reality Television in the Chinese Mediascape: A Case Study of the Reality-Variety Program Who’s the Murderer". Graduated. 

  • Alan Ropke, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, "Profitable Addictainment: The Intersection of Entertainment, Hate Speech, and Radicalization on Kick.com". Graduated.