People, Citizen, and User: Shifting Articulations of Audience in Chinese Communication Research (1978 - 2021)

The book examines the changing discourses of Chinese audience research in the past four decades, aiming to shed light on the complicated relationships among China’s media, audiences, and society.

With the new sociology of knowledge, it adopts Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory as a meta-theoretical framework and interprets the concept of audience as a floating signifier. Based on the corpus of Chinese academic journal papers, the author divides the scope of analysis into four phases. In ea...