Guobin Yang, Ph.D.

Director

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society. He is the author of the award–winning The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009) and The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016). He is the editor or co–editor of four books: Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Victor Pickard, 2017), China’s Contested Internet (2015), The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (with Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, 2016), and Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (with Ching–Kwan Lee, 2007). Previously he taught as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii–Manoa and as an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature with a specialty in Literary Translation from Beijing Foreign Studies University and a second Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University.

Rosemary Clark-Parsons, Ph.D.

Associate Director

Rosemary Clark–Parsons received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication in 2018, where she currently serves as the Associate Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow with CDCS and a Research Affiliate with Penn’s Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality & Women. Clark–Parsons is a researcher, teacher, and activist working at the intersection of technology and gender justice. Her research centers on questions of how digital platforms and their users are reconfiguring the face and reach of contemporary feminist social movements in the United States. Her book project, Doing it Ourselves: The Networked Practices of Feminist Media Activism, demonstrates how feminists are taking up networked media to pursue a do–it–ourselves–style feminism, building movements and communities from the ground up, all while juggling the affordances and limitations of their media tools. In the classroom, Clark–Parsons has worked with a diverse range of students, from high schoolers to undergraduates to continuing adult learners, to develop media and communication strategies for social justice. Prior to Penn, Clark–Parsons attended Ursinus College, where she received her B.A. in Media and Communication Studies.