Global Media Ethnography Lab’s Director, Assistant Professor Jing Wang chaired a panel at the 2026 International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference at the University of Galway, Ireland on Monday June 29.
Dr. Wang, Assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison researches how people use media to tell their stories and build connections across borders. From an ethnographic perspective, Dr. Wang sees the centering of local contexts in an age of anti-globalization and hyper-individualization as an opportunity to rediscover the human value.
The panel focused on how can global media scholars can reconcile the pressures shaping both our professional and personal lives while continuing to push for theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization. Simultaneously, it addresses how scholars can maintain the integrity of ethnographic investigation into the thickness of the local without losing sight of broader geopolitical, economic, and ideological forces.
“Ethnography, as both a mode of anthropological writing and an empirical methodological approach, has influenced global media studies, especially in areas of media effects, reception, production, and circulation,” she says. “With the emergence of digital media such as the Internet and social platforms, ethnographic approaches have also enabled media scholars and anthropologists to engage substantively with both theoretical and methodological challenges, including but not limited to studying the materiality of media technologies.”
Alongside Dr. Wang, the panel presenters include:
Omar Al-Ghazzi, Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics,
Nicholas Glastonbury, postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University,
Mariela Morales Suárez is a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University, and
Patrick D. Murphy, Verizon Chair in Global Broadband and Telecommunication and Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University.
