Jiaxi Hou

I’m an interdisciplinary ethnographer. I study how people with few options turn to digital technologies for a way out, and how digital engagement reshapes their social positions in return. Since 2016, I’ve spent time with disadvantaged individuals in China and beyond, witnessing how they learn these innovations, make sense of them, and bend them to their own ends. I listened to unemployed young men shouting out frustrations and yearnings on video-sharing apps. I watched rural mothers teach themselves to sell mountain herbs on livestream. I also traced small business owners who went bankrupt during the pandemic and turned to crypto for a way back up. What I keep finding is that digital inclusion isn’t an ending, but where new kinds of marginalization begin, ones that run through these technologies from recommendation algorithms and gig platforms to blockchain and AI.

I completed my PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2024, on the remaking of social class in digital China. I'm now a Research Fellow at RMIT, working on the ADM+S Signature Project "Language and Cultural Diversity in Automated Decision-Making: Australia in the Asia Pacific." My current work focuses on how disadvantaged and marginalized groups become the human infrastructure that decentralized networks run on.

Before academia, I worked as a news editor at SOHU.com and an independent documentary producer. I grew up in an immigrant family — my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all newcomers to the places they eventually called home. That history — the precarity and the resilience of arriving, leaving, and starting again — is what keeps me interested in how class and marginalization actually land on a life, and why I see them as continuously remade rather than fixed.