Meng Li
Professor of Communication Studies Loyola Marymount University
Biography
Dr. Li’s scholarly work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Family Communication, Family Relations, Gender, Work & Organization, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Journalism, among others. In addition to publishing in academic outlets, Dr. Li has written for public audiences on issues of migration, mobility, and family in both English and Chinese. Her scholarship has won many awards from professional organizations, such as top paper awards and distinguished article awards from the National Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communication Association (ICA). She was also honored with an Early Career Award from NCA’s Ethnography Division.
Dr. Li regularly teaches communication theory and research and courses in the Department’s Relational Communication concentration, such as Relational Communication, Relationships in Context, Global Intimacies, Family Communication in an Unequal World, and Relational Communication Capstone.
Education
University of Iowa
Ph.D.
Communication Studies
2014
University of Iowa
M.A.
Communication Studies
2013
Communication University of China
B.A.
Journalism
2008
Areas of Expertise
Articles
阴影式家庭关系：当我们谈论原生家庭时，我们在谈论什么 (The darkness of family relationships: What we talk about when we talk about “family of origin”)
缪斯夫人李萌
2025-07-01
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Psychologizing the family: How a subversive discourse went mainstream
Journal of Family CommunicationMeng Li
2025-06-01
Top Paper Award, Interpersonal Communication Division, International Communication Association, 2024
This critical inquiry takes a Foucauldian approach to interrogate how the Chinese discourse of “family of origin,” a system of meanings that subverts dominant family values, has risen to influence in China. Family of origin was initially a Western academic concept. In the mid-2010s, its Chinese translation yuansheng jiating swiftly gained traction in the public sphere, fostering a new paradigm of knowledge about the family and its impact on individuals. A thematic analysis of high-ranking family-of-origin videos reveals how this discourse psychologizes family issues. While problematizing harmful relationships and legitimizing unorthodox family practices, such as estrangement, the discourse interprets individual – family relations through a psychological lens and prescribes mostly therapeutic remedies. I argue that the psychologization of the family has operated as an important mechanism in generating new power/knowledge that reconfigures Chinese families, exemplifying a global trend of integrating therapeutic culture into communication about family.
Care as infrastructure: Rethinking working mothers’ childcare crisis in the COVID-19 pandemic
Gender, Work & OrganizationMeng Li, Corrina Laughlin
2024-11-01
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government promoted the idea of care as infrastructure to justify government spending on nonphysical infrastructures. In this article, we demonstrate the usefulness of adopting an infrastructure framework for researching care and caring through an analysis of working mothers' communication on Reddit in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing infrastructural inversion as a heuristic, we conceptualize the childcare crisis experienced by working mothers in many Western societies as an infrastructural disruption in which the cascading failure of childcare infrastructures exposed the background work of care as well as its vulnerability and invisibility. We also argue that, against this backdrop, an alternate infrastructure of digital caring emerged. However, this informal infrastructure was inadequate to sustain the needs of working mothers, and its emergence, in itself, provides proof of the need to value care as infrastructure. Ultimately, we showcase how conceptualizing care as infrastructure can enrich feminist theorization of care, and that centering care as infrastructure redresses the bias toward physical infrastructure in the scholarly literature.
Maternal emotions and childrearing in China
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of CommunicationMeng Li
2024-04-17
Psychological research on maternal emotions often examines how mothers’ emotional expression or regulation may affect children’s development. This perpetual interest in the benefit and harm of mothers’ emotions reflects popular beliefs that women are inherently emotional and, as the primary caregiver of children, mothers must restrain and regulate their emotions in order to raise well-balanced children. Rather than treating maternal emotions as private, intrapersonal feelings, scholars from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, communication, women’s and gender studies, etc.) have recognized that many sociocultural forces contribute to the formation and interpretation of emotions. Emotions are not just a primary means through which humans experience the world but are also an avenue for understanding both the individual and the society. The interaction between the psychological and the social is especially salient in societies undergoing radical social transformations, such as China.
Guilt and Compensation: The Interplay Between Maternal Emotions and Parent–Child Relationships in Migrant Families
Family RelationsMeng Li
2023-10-01
Migrant mothers are documented to experience intense feelings of guilt due to long-term separation from their children. Research on maternal guilt frequently conceptualizes guilt as a negative self-judgement of mothers without considering the bidirectional interplay between mother–child interactions and mothers' guilt feelings. Interviews with Chinese rural–urban migrant mothers demonstrate left-behind children's power to elicit, exacerbate, and alleviate their mothers' guilt, which in turn prompts migrant mothers to engage in a wide range of compensatory practices to remedy their relationships with their children. These interpersonal dynamics highlight the relational nature of maternal guilt; the double victimization, both by public discourses and family members, experienced by migrant mothers; and the mutual support that can be offered between mothers and children.
“Are you me?”: Understanding the political potential of feminist identity spaces on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic
Communication, Culture & CritiqueCorrina Laughlin, Meng Li
2023-09-01
In this study we performed a critical discourse analysis of the r/workingmoms subreddit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020). Using this data we argue that Reddit’s platform can facilitate what we schematize as feminist “identity spaces.” We use the heuristic of “spaces” rather than “networks” or “online communities” and connect this theorization to our understanding of the discursive work on the subreddit which facilitates in-group communication and situated structural critique. However, we also interrogate the political possibilities of identity spaces and understand them as a symptom of what Angela McRobbie has called “the cultural politics of disarticulation.” Ultimately, we argue that the same platform affordances that allow for identity spaces to thrive also limit their political potency and we frame this within Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “cruel optimism.”
Lighting Up the Darkness: The Emergence of the “Family of Origin” Discourse in China
Journal of Family CommunicationMeng Li
2023-04-23
Since the mid-2010s, the concept “family of origin” has achieved surprising popularity in China. Different from family of origin’s academic meaning and neutral connotation in English, its Chinese translation, yuansheng jiating (原生家庭), explicitly draws attention to how parents and family can do harm to children. Adopting a phronetic iterative approach, I analyzed 48 family of origin narrative videos and their comments on one of China’s largest video-sharing sites, Bilibili.com, using the Darkness Model of Family Communication as a heuristic tool. Results revealed an interlocking system of individual, dyadic, familial, and social levels of family darkness, collaboratively articulated by online narrators and commenters. I argue that the Chinese discourse of family of origin opens up a dialogic space where communication about family problems and critiques of patriarchal family culture can take place in the time of neo-familism in China.
“Only Mother Is the Best in the World”: Maternal Guilt, Migrant Motherhood, and Changing Ideologies of Childrearing in China
Journal of Family CommunicationMeng Li
2022-04-01
Winner of the 2022 Journal of Family Communication Outstanding Article Award, 2023
Winner of the Outstanding Article Award, the Asian/Pacific American Caucus and Studies Division, National Communication Association (NCA), 2023
Honorable Mention, the Anita Taylor Outstanding Published Article Award, The Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG), 2023
Winner of the Top Paper Award, Family Communication Division, National Communication Association (NCA), 2021
China’s childrearing culture has undergone dramatic transformations in recent decades, redefining ideals of childrearing in ways that relegate rural-to-urban migrant mothers to a marginalized position. This article explores the repercussions of changing childrearing ideologies in China on the subjectivities of rural migrant mothers through a critical inquiry into their expressions of maternal guilt. Based on interviews with migrant mothers who voiced profound guilt for leaving their children behind, this study uncovers the intersectional oppressive power of three intertwined childrearing ideologies – traditional gender beliefs, the “left-behind children” discourse, and the urban middle-class parenting model. These ideologies, firmly grounded in but also articulated with institutionalized marginalization based on gender, hukou status, and class, frame migrant mothers’ childcare as aberrant and subject them to guilt and self-blame. Integrating Althusser’s concept of interpellation and the theory of intersectionality, this study contributes to the expanding literature of Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC) research.
Staying put over the Lunar New Year: Celebrating pandemic style
University of Westminster The Contemporary China Centre BlogMeng Li
2021-02-10
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从流动到留守，三个“深圳儿童”返乡的这一年 (From migration to displacement: Recollections from three “Shenzhen children” one year after returning “home”)
南都观察家李萌
2019-08-07
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Formation and fragmentation within a networked public sphere: Social media debates on traditional Chinese medicine
Telematics and InformaticsLi Chen, Xianwei Wu, Meng Li
2018-12-01
By analyzing the social media posts published by the scientific community and conventional media organizations, the study explored the recent social media debates on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). A combination of textual analysis and content analysis revealed two main findings. First, different networks of expertise on Weibo generated conflicting discourses about TCM: while the scientific community contributed the overwhelming majority of posts that criticized TCM, conventional media outlets were much more likely to promote TCM without skepticism. Implications of the finding is discussed. Second, the social media debate did not appear to facilitate problem solving, evidenced by the fact that only a small portion of the posts included rational comments about the controversy. In addition, users typically communicated only with users who shared their viewpoints, resulting in few communications between groups. The trend illustrates the fragmentation of China’s networked public sphere on Weibo.
Maintaining ties and reaffirming unity: Family rituals in the age of migration
Journal of Family CommunicationMeng Li
2018-11-01
Winner of the Distinguished Journal Article Award, Family Communication Division, National Communication Association, 2023
This ethnographic study examines the forms and functions of ritualizing in migrant families, using Chinese rural-urban migrant workers’ annual Spring Festival family reunions as a case study. In-depth interviews with migrant workers and participant observations of family reunions in rural China reveal that both celebratory and non-celebratory family activities are ritualized. In particular, the study suggests that the Spring Festival family reunion has transformed into a meta-ritual comprised of five categories of ritual activities: festival rituals, reunion rituals, patterned interactions, reunions with friends, and communal rituals. These rituals constitute both the internal and external identities of migrant families, but may also remind them of the traumatic reality of family separation or trigger hidden tensions within the family. Implications for studying family communication in times of mobility and family diversity are discussed.
Staging a social drama: Ritualized framing of the Spring Festival homecoming in Chinese state media
JournalismMeng Li
2018-09-01
The transformation of Chinese media from the propaganda organ of the Party-state to its central means of hegemony has given rise to typified news practices that vary in formality but cohere in functionality. Integrating theories of media ritual and framing, this study explores how Chinese state media ritualistically manufacture a public consensus on the interpretation of the annual Spring Festival homecoming, a chronic social problem that exposes socioeconomic inequalities and policy deficiencies. An analysis of the 2014 homecoming coverage on China Central Television (CCTV) reveals that state media create and popularize a state-sponsored social drama, reducing a complex, multifaceted social problem to a one-dimensional transportation crisis. This media ritual, in accordance with both the state’s mandate to maintain social stability and the media’s logic of commercial success, contains alternative interpretations and obscures the important social concerns encapsulated in this issue.
Review of The Mediated Construction of Reality, authored by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp
Journalism & Mass Communication QuarterlyMeng Li
2017-12-01
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"Brighter the moon over my home village”: Some patterned ways of speaking about home among Chinese rural-urban migrant workers
Journal of International and Intercultural CommunicationMeng Li
2016-01-01
Winner of the John T. Warren Top Student Paper Award, Ethnography Division, National Communication Association, 2014
Drawing on a social constructionist approach and Philipsen's theoretical framework of cultural communication, this study examines how rural–urban migrant workers in China construct the meaning of home in their communication about migration. Interviews with migrant workers and participant observation of their everyday conversations reveal that migrant workers frequently evoke a cultural code of home attachment and actively construct a political code of displacement to construe their prolonged liminality between the city and the countryside. Implications for studying the use of culturally specific and politically situated discursive practices to address common challenges of displacement are discussed.
Ritual and social change: Chinese rural-urban migrant workers’ Spring Festival homecoming as secular pilgrimage
Journal of Intercultural Communication ResearchMeng Li
2014-04-01
Drawing upon Clifford Geertz’s interpretive approach to ritual, this study examines the meaning of the annual Spring Festival homecoming performed by rural-to-urban migrant workers in China. Built on participant observation of the ritual and in-depth interviews with 25 migrant workers, I suggest that the homecoming is a secular pilgrimage, the meaning of which emerges around travelers’ communication about suffering on the journey and the pursuit of an ideal “home” through communal traveling. This ritual exemplifies symbolic forms of communication used to cope with and make sense of social changes in modern societies.
