Lei Chen

Graduate Student

Easton Graduate Teaching Fellow

What is Lei's Story?

Lei Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research centers around storytelling on digital platforms and its empowering potential. He excels at collecting various types of data from digital platforms and flexibly utilizes computational, quantitative, and qualitative text analysis methods to process them. He particularly examines the representation of minorities, and the Global South constructed through emerging genres (e.g., vlogs, VR documentaries) and their role in challenging or reinforcing biases. Outside of academics, he enjoys making music and developing stories.

Courses

JMC:1200-Intro to Media and Culture (Fall 2023, Spring & Summer 2024)
JMC:2020-Multimedia Storytelling (Fall 2022 & Spring 2023)
JMC:1200-Media History and Culture (Fall 2021 & Spring 2022)

PUBLICATIONS
Journal Articles

Zhang, B., Chen, L., & Moe, A. (2024). Examining the Effects of Social Media Warning Labels on Perceived Credibility and Intent to Engage with Health Misinformation: The Moderating Role of Vaccine Hesitancy. Journal of health communication, 1-10.

Chen, L., Dowling, D., & Goetz, C. (2023). At the nexus of ludology and narratology: Advances in reality-based story-driven games. F1000Research, 12.

Hu, Y., & Chen, L. (2022). A Review of Internet-Based Communication Research in China. Online Media and Global Communication, 1(1), 124-163.

Published Book Chapters

Chen, L., & Dowling, D. (forthcoming). Interactive Documentary Making. In Fowler-Watt, Karen (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Journalism Education.

Chen, L. (2023). Augmented, Mixed, and Virtual Reality. In Wolf, Mark & Perron, Bernard (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2nd Edition). Routledge, New York, United States.

Peer-Reviewed Conference Presentations

Chen, L., & Zhou, K. (2024, August). “You Are Not Fat”: A Mixed-Methods Study of 'BOPO' Discourse on Chinese Social Media Platform RED. Presented to the Cultural and Critical Studies Division at the annual conference of Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Xu, Z., Chen, L., Zhang, B., & Young, R. (2024, August). What Do Doctors “Tok” about Health? A Content Analysis of Doctor Influencers’ Videos on Chinese TikTok (Douyin). Presented to the Communicating Science, Health, Environment, and Risk Division at the annual conference of Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Zhang, B., Chen, L., & Xu, Z. (2024, June). The (Im)moral Judgement in Vaccination Decision Making: Examining the Effects of Moral Exemplar on Vaccination Attitude and Intention. Presented to the Health Communication Division at the annual conference of International Communication Association (ICA), Gold Coast, Australia.

Chen, L., & Xu, Z. (2023, August). New Representation of Africa？: An Analysis of Africa-based Chinese Diaspora Vlog Practice. Presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Annual Conference, Washington, D.C., USA.

Xu, Z., Chen, L., & Zhou, K. (2023, May). Is the #StopAsianHate Movement a Myth? A Content Analysis of the Reality of #StopAsianHate Videos on TikTok. Presented at the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada.

Chen, L. (2022, August). Does Narrative Still Matter? The Future of Narrative in Immersive Journalism. Presented at the AEJMC Annual Conference, Detroit, MI, USA.

Awards & Honors

The Easton Graduate Teaching Fellowship. School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa. 2024

Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship. Graduate College, University of Iowa. 2024

The Easton Collaborative Research Award. School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa. 2022

Skills

Programming

Python and R for data crawling and visualization
Python and R for computer-assisted visual analysis, semantic network analysis, sentiment analysis and topic modeling

Media Production