Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Lin, "Communication and community-building: The role of ethnic media in the Chinese immigrant community of Los Angeles," 2004
USC Dissertation in New Media
August 24, 2009
Wan-Ying Lin, Ph.D.
Abstract (Summary)
Ethnic media are central to immigrants' lives. Drawing upon communication infrastructure theory, this study positions ethnic media in an overall communication environment where immigrants, community organizations, and ethnic media form a storytelling network and act upon community problems collectively. The author examined immigrants' dependency relationships with ethnic media and the extent to which ethnic media work as essential storytellers in building community in Los Angeles' Greater Monterey Park area, where one of the largest ethnic Chinese enclaves is located. The data were collected by multiple methods, including a telephone survey of 321 households, interviews with 30 ethnic media producers, and a content analysis of 34 issues of ethnic newspapers. The findings revealed the central role that these media played in immigrants' lives relative to other communication channels including interpersonal conversation, mainstream media, and new media. It was found that first-generation immigrants generally depended more on ethnic media than their second-generation counterparts. Older Chinese residents also spent much more time connected to ethnic media than did young adults. In addition, residents who had lived in the neighborhood for five years or longer, but still connected highly to ethnic media, showed a lower sense of belonging than those longer-term residents who depended less on ethnic media. Moreover, Taiwanese-origin residents spent more time on ethnic media than Chinese immigrants from Mainland China and Hong Kong.
The content analysis revealed that more than half of the stories analyzed were concerned with home countries, whereas local news comprised only 8 percent of the total. Geo-ethnic stories, which are culturally and locally relevant stories that are promoted by this study, accounted for only 6 percent. Given that Chinese immigrants relied primarily on ethnic media for community information and that local content comprised only a small percentage of coverage in the ethnic press, the vision of "storytelling into community building" has yet to become a reality.
Advisor: Ball-Rokeach, Sandra
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Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.