Zhe Liu

My research interests revolve around multimodal communication and meaning-making practices in online environments. I received my doctoral degree from the School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the University of Leeds. My PhD research incorporated insights from meme studies and employed a multimodal social semiotic analysis to examine how Chinese youths used internet memes to express pro-government opinions during the Diba Expedition (2016-2019), a series of online activities engaging with political issues related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sweden. My findings highlight the context-dependent nature of the multimodal memes I examined, revealing their innovative appropriation of subcultural elements to convey political ideas, reinforce hegemonic mindsets, and reflect Chinese youths’ interpretations of China’s geopolitical positions.  

Alongside my PhD research, I led the Multimodality Online Reading Group and am serving as a co-ordinator for the MULTIMODALITY Talk series. I also worked as a research assistant for the PanMeMic project. Based on a large dataset of Facebook posts and comments, this participatory research explored meaning-making practices during the Covid-19 pandemic and introduced citizen sociosemitics as a research method. 

As a LAHRI Postdoctoral Fellow, I am converting my PhD thesis into a monograph, which will present a diachronic study of multimodal memes produced during the Diba Expedition from 2016 to 2019. Unlike existing research that focuses on isolated events, this work will provide a comprehensive account of multiple online expeditions across four years, offering deeper insights into China’s political discourse and youth participation. Using public datasets from my PhD, I am also expanding my analysis of internet memes that were circulated during the 2018 Diba Expedition to address Sino-Swedish conflicts and engage with counter-narratives on YouTube. My work will contribute to scholarship on transnational cyber nationalist activities, particularly by exploring how visual and audio-visual artefacts were adapted in digital political communication between China and Sweden as a Nordic country. 

In addition to works built on my PhD research, I am developing a funding proposal to investigate state-led multimodal messaging on social media platforms. 

Publications

Monograph

Internet memes and cyber nationalism: a diachronic study of China’s Diba Expedition (2016-2019) (in preparation) 

Journal article

Adami, E., Djonov, E. and Liu, Z. (2024) ‘Doing citizen sociosemiotics in the Covid-19 pandemic’, Discourse & Communication, 18(5), pp. 663–692. 

Liu, Z. 刘喆 (2017) ‘Dutu shidai de huayu fenxi 读图时代的话语分析’, Yuyan yu fuhao 语言与符号, 3, pp. 45–59. 

Reviews

Liu, Z. (2022) ‘The evolution of the Chinese internet: creative visibility in the digital public: by Shaohua Guo, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2020, 311 pp., £22.99, ISBN 9781503614437’, Information, Communication & Society, 26(9), pp. 1911–1913. 

Conferences and Presentations

Liu, Z. (2023) ‘Recontextualisation and vernacular creativity in Chinese political internet memes’, 11th International Conference on Multimodality, London, United Kingdom (27-29 September) 

Liu, Z. (2022) ‘Binaries in political internet memes: A multimodal analysis of China’s Diba Expedition’, Sociolinguistics Symposium 24, Ghent, Belgium (13-16 July) 

Liu, Z. (2022) ‘Political internet memes from China: A multimodal corpus-based analysis of the Diba Expedition”, The Bremen-Groningen Online Workshops on Multimodality, online (8 July) 

Liu, Z. (2021) ‘Political communication and internet memes from China: a multimodal corpus-based analysis’, Theoretical and Analytical Multimodality Studies, Wroclaw, Poland (9-10 December) 

Liu, Z. (2021) ‘Political internet memes on Facebook: Multimodal meaning-making in China’s Diba Expedition to Hong Kong’, 8th Conference on Computer-mediated Communication and Social Media Corpora, Nijmegen, Netherland (28-29 October) 

Liu, Z. (2021) ‘Internet memes, youth civic engagement and literacy learning in China’, 10th International Conference on Multimodality, Valparaiso, Chile (23-27 August) 

Liu, Z. (2021) ‘Multimodality, internet memes, and digital activism of the Diba Expedition”, CTS (Centre for Translation Studies) research seminar series, Leeds, United Kingdom (14 April) 

Liu, Z. (2021) ‘Internet memes and digital activism on Facebook: A multimodal corpus-based analysis of China’s Diba Expedition”, Discourse and Politics 2021 seminar series, online (8 February) 

Teaching

I have taught modules on visual communication and Chinese spoken language.

Qualifications

PhD Languages, Cultures, and Societies 

MA Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics 

BA English