Areas of Interest
My background is in visual culture art education, and my current research interest falls into visual culture, digital literacy, and social justice. Much of my work focuses on these questions: (1) how do people make sense of the world through digital visual culture?, (2) how can social media and online communities positively impact everyday life through digital visual culture?, and (3) how can researchers and educators incorporate digital visual culture into their practices to promote inclusion, diversity, and social justice?
Summary of My Research
My dissertation is a qualitative case study on Inspirational Meme, a course/research project involving a group of Art Appreciation students using their self-made Internet memes as activist art to intervene in r/Teenagers, a youth community on the social media platform Reddit (https://www.reddit.com). Driven by critical pedagogy (Freire, 1996), this study was conducted to better understand how art activism, an approach to social justice art education, facilitates critical learning for students in online settings. Data includes eight students’ Inspirational Memes, researcher onsite observations and field notes, and other pedagogical documentation such as the project guideline and prompts. The initial findings from data analysis reveal that online art activism helps facilitate learning objectives promoted by critical pedagogy, such as problem-posing, conscientization, agency development, and dialogue. In addition to a holistic description of this study that may provide a transferrable experience to readers for teaching and learning, I also offer insight into the strengths and limitations of social media as a pedagogical and research tool and provide suggestions for future research.
I have presented elements of my dissertation research at national and international conferences, such as the National Art Education Association Convention (NAEA) and the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) Conference, among others. My dissertation was selected as a methodological example in the textbook Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World, published in early 2021. In addition, I was selected by the UGA Art Education faculty to present my dissertation as part of the Seminar for Research in Art Education (SRAE) and Marylyn Zurmuehlen Working Papers at 2021 NAEA.
A related line of work is the interdisciplinary application of visual culture. Along with some great peer scholars from the sport management area, we co-developed a conceptual framework that explores the relationship between artistic roles and sports fans. For this line of work, we used identity theory and aesthetic experiences to study how sports fans receive and respond to sports sponsorship information online. This collaboration has led to two book chapters: one is “The role of art in the persuasiveness of sports sponsorship: An aesthetic perspective of fandom in today’s media world,” in the peer-reviewed book Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Media Fandom, and the other is “Art education in eSports: How to incorporate aesthetics into the eSports marketing curriculum” in Pathways and opportunities into the business of eSports, both peer-reviewed and published by IGI Global.
Research Strengths and Methodological Skills
I approach inquiries through qualitative methods and mixed methods. Trained by the Art Education Ph.D. program and the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies Graduate Certificate program at the University of Georgia, I have conducted studies by several theoretical and methodological frameworks, including symbolic interaction, critical theory, case study, interview, narrative analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis.
I use digital technologies to help conduct my research. I am experienced in using Adobe applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere as my arts-based research methods. EndNote, a reference management system, has been the main tool used for sorting literature. Among many data collection tools specifically for social media, I am more familiar with DiscoverText (Facebook) and Crimson Hexagon (Reddit). Finally, I am a MAXQDA (a qualitative data analysis software) user when retrieving YouTube data or examining data through mixed methods.
Although I am a qualitative methodologist, I do not limit myself to conducting qualitative inquiry only. I embrace different worldviews and am open to collaborating with quantitative researchers to conduct mix-methods studies. My experience of working with scholars from other disciplines shows that I am happy to contribute to diverse and complex teams to spark possibilities. Finally, I view myself as a researcher as well as an educator and am interested in developing more Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects to craft my research through teaching.
Future Direction
In the future, exploring visual culture, digital literacy, and social justice will continue to be the center of my research. My studies will remain surrounding the three research questions listed in the first section of the statement because, in my opinion, the potential answers to these questions can help establish a better (digital) world and make people better ci/netizens. I plan to focus more on Internet memes and YouTube videos to better understand their impact on the Information Age. I am open to studying many topics that fit the conceptual and methodological themes of my research. A few emerging strands:
· Humor, especially the production of humor in Internet memes and viral videos—how do people come up with funny but inspiring ideas?
· Ethics, such as ethical considerations or dilemmas for social media and online research
· The impact of big data, machine learning, and AI on the field of art education—whether as a tool, a new medium, or as a form of inquiry
Moving forward, I am committed to initiating collaborations with peer scholars, advancing empirical knowledge, and pursuing external funding and grants in the field of art education scholarship. As an international scholar from Taiwan, I hope I hope to contribute to a globally connected society by bringing more international cases and collaborations into my research.
Publications
Lee, J. D. (2021). Using Reddit as a research site to generate and collect data (vignette). In Paulus, T. & Lester, J. N., Doing qualitative research with digital tools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage publication.
Lee, J. D. & Chou, W. W. (2021). Art education in eSports: How to incorporate aesthetics into the eSports marketing curriculum. In Crawford, C. M. & White, S. A. (Eds.), Pathways and opportunities into the business of eSports (peer-reviewed). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Chou, W. W., Lee, J. D. & Zhang, J. J. (2020). The role of art in the persuasiveness of sport sponsorship: An aesthetic perspective of fandom in today’s media world. In Dunn. A. (Eds.), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Media Fandom (peer-reviewed). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Lee, J. D.(2018). Her own hero: The origin of the women’s self-defense movement. Sport in History, 1-2. DOI: 10.1080/17460263.2018.1506894
Lee, J. D.(2014). An interview with artists: Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher. Journal of the Texas Art Education Association, Autumn, 50-53.