Tianyang Fu

Tianyang Fu is a Ph.D. student in Communication Studies (Organizational Communication & Technology) at the Moody College of Communication, the University of Texas at Austin. She explores how digital media, cultural production, and ICTs represent and participate in the power interactions between the state, market, and society, while highlighting their mutual-embeddedness and conflicts. She examines this issue with a strong passion for theory and for individuals’ agency as revealed in the dichotomy of oppression and resistance. Her research interests include the Political Economy of Communication & Media, Critical Communication Research, Digital Labor & Gig Work, Algorithmic Management, Human-Computer/AI Interaction, and Algorithmic Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE).

She obtained a B.A. in Journalism (Intercultural Communication) from Beijing Foreign Studies University with a minor in International Economics and Trade, and later an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago with a concentration in sociology, focusing on public mobilization during social movements and social transitions. She received the 2023 Dallas Smythe Award.

At TIPI, as a graduate student research fellow, she will conduct the project initially entitled “By the People but Not for the People: Invisible Labor of Data Annotation Behind AI Development”, in which she will scrutinize the organizational factors that facilitate data annotation as hidden work.