Xing Wan

Xing Wan is a PHD student in the school of Journalism and Communication, Wuhan University, P.R.China, majoring in “Intercultural Communication Theory”. She studied Advertising in Shenzhen University in China and received her MA degree in Cultural Studies from Lancaster University in UK. Her interests are visual culture, contemporary women’s studies and discourse analysis.

My Ph.D. investigation will focus on “Compare and Contrast the Way in which Visual Culture is understood in China and in Western World Based on Intercultural Communication Aspect”. Visual culture is an important part in people’s daily living activities. It is a new research area growing fast as a new cultural modality after discourse culture. This research, employed intercultural communication as a platform, discussed in depth on “visual turning” under current situation and trend, plus analyzed in more details in visual culture among different cultural systems and both similarities and differences of Chinese and Western culture in particular. This will truly reflect many social problems of the reality and provide theoretical and practical meanings of how to improve the culture in this globalization trend. As the intercultural communication studies may involve much broader areas such as communication theory, sociology, rhetoric, semiology, aesthetics, psychology and anthropology, etc, I will include some of these areas in order to produce more comparable analysis for different cultures. I believe the result will draw a brand new picture of and show a totally different view of the understanding of visual culture. The methodology of this research will mainly include content analysis, frame analysis and spot check statistics, etc. In particular, I will put these methodologies together with those I employed for “visual culture” study, namely, textual analysis, semiotics analysis, discourse analysis and such, trying to adopt the methodologies used in other subjects and complement them with this research.