Bio

George Ran Zhao, a PhD student at Temple University in philadelphia. As an interdisciplinary cultural scholar, George Ran is interested in consumer culture, global media, and creative work/labor, empirically focusing on video games. His scholarship examines how consumer subjectivity — identity, morality, and imagination — shift in global digital capitalism, as well as cultural production in East Asian internet industries.

Born in a city where minarets rise against a horizon of desert, George Ran has spent his life since in restless motion — chasing knowledge across borders, languages, and disciplines. He has lived and studied in China, Japan, and the United States — earning a master's degree in Communication from Renmin University, bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Journalism (with honors) from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and pursuing further study in Sociology and STS at the University of California, Davis, and in Liberal Arts at Tohoku University. 

His work has been recognized with a Top Student Paper Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and he has presented papers at the International Communication Association (ICA), the International Sociological Association (ISA), the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), the American Sociological Association (ASA), and the National Communication Association (NCA).