From Live Streams to Warehouses: Platform Economies in Rural China with Lizhen Zhao

Teaching, Emerging Technology, and the Power to Say No with Michelle Ciccone

We sat down with Michelle Ciccone, a PhD candidate, educator, and curriculum designer, to talk about teaching and learning in a deeply digital world. Drawing on her experience in K–12 education and media literacy research, Michelle reflects on how educators think critically about technology in schools. The conversation centers on her concept of media quittercy, the idea that refusing or stepping away from certain technologies can itself be a form of media literacy, as well as how schools are grappling with AI, technological inevitability, and the balance between access, risk, and care.

From Live Streams to Warehouses: Platform Economies in Rural China with Lizhen Zhao

In this episode of COMM As You Are, we sit down with Lizhen Zhao, a PhD candidate in Communication at UMass Amherst, to talk about her ethnographic research on e-commerce and platform economies in rural China. Drawing on fieldwork in her hometown in Gansu Province, including working inside a distribution center, Lizhen explores how digital platforms reshape labor, land, and everyday life. We discuss rural livestreaming and the commodification of agricultural labor, the material infrastructures that make platform convenience possible, and the environmental and human costs hidden behind logistics, surveillance, and “green” platform initiatives like Ant Forest.

Cinemas, Deepfakes, and the Politics of Seeing in a Post-Digital World with Shahnaz Bashir

A PhD candidate and novelist Shahnaz Bashir sits down with COMM As You Are to unpack how a single cinema in Kashmir becomes a visual archive of power. Through two photographs taken seventy-six years apart, Shahnaz Bashir traces a striking transformation: from 1947 crowds openly gathering to hear a political leader speak, to 2023 scenes where military bunkers are concealed behind propaganda billboards during a tightly managed state spectacle. Bashir reflects on how the Palladium Cinema’s shifting roles—from cultural venue to political office to surveilled, shuttered site—reveal the ways buildings, images, and media infrastructures become battlegrounds for democracy, memory, and control.

Performing Labor, Pricing Art: Dr Brendan McCauley on Art Practice in the Digital Age

What happens to art when the gallery moves online - and when artists can no longer afford to live near it? Dr Brendan McCauley joins us to explore how digital platforms, economic pressures, and the pandemic have reshaped creative practice. From regional artists in Western Mass to global changes in film editing software, Brendan's work examines how production communities adapt—and what gets lost in translation. This episode unpacks how space, labor, and technology intersect in the art world today.

Data, Dissent, and Digital Communities: Larri Miller on Critical Computational Social Science

Larri Miller is helping define a new subfield: critical computational social science. In this episode, we talk about their research on right-wing digital communities, their commitment to mixed methods, and the epistemological roots of conspiracy belief. Along the way, we unpack the limits of data, the politics of platforms, and why understanding the “why” matters as much as measuring the “what.”