Personal profile
Biography
Ken Zheng is an ethnographic writer and digital anthropologist. She received her PhD in Anthropology from University College London (2025) and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on China in the World, Australian National University. Her research examines the often unseen infrastructures of Chinese social media platforms, with particular attention to the materiality of data, the operational role of metrics such as DAU, and the conceptual vocabularies through which technical practitioners understand infrastructure and their own positionality within it. Her forthcoming project investigates the transnational circulation of Chinese emotion AI in Southeast Asia, exploring how these systems generate diffuse and ambient forms of affective governance. More broadly, her work considers the subtle, everyday ways in which technological systems become embedded in intimate life, reshaping how emotions are sensed, mediated, and lived. Beyond academia, she works with photography and documentary forms, and occasionally curates independent exhibitions. She is also an enthusiastic, if not particularly skilled, boulderer.
Education/Academic qualification
Digital Anthropology, PhD, The Backstage of Social Media: High Tech, the Aspirational Generation, and China's Big Factory, Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL)
28 Oct 2020 → 28 Nov 2025
Award Date: 28 Nov 2025
External Scholarly Memberships and Affiliations
Research Fellow, Centre for Digital Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL)
2026 → …