Dr. Zhe Xu

Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Associate

LMU Munich, Germany
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Hello! 


I am a Research Associate (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow) working with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch in the Department of Media and Communication (IfKW) at LMU Munich, Germany.


My research primarily investigates the (de)politicization, platformization, and algorithmization of mediating global humanitarian crises. I am a PI of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) project “Global Disparities in Journalistic Practices in Mediating Migration Crises” (2024-2026). My work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and books, including Int J Commun, Int Commun Gaz, Media Cult Soc, Journalism, Eur J Commun, and in the volume (De)constructing Societal Threats During Times of Deep Mediatization.


I have received computational methodology and data science training at the University of Cologne, UC Davis, and the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. Additionally, I serve as a reviewer for several academic journals (Int J Commun, Journal pract), international conferences (i.e. ECREA), and the Czech Science Foundation.


Feel free to reach me via email: zhe.xu@ifkw.lmu.de 


Research Interests

Selected Publications

News images have been powerful agents in chronicling humanitarian crises, shaping public engagement with vulnerability, and inhibiting or supporting societal and political interactions. Research critically indicates that refugees frequently face dehumanizing visuals in news media. However, the humanitarian communication literature has primarily limited itself to surveying the vulnerability of the global South as visualized by Western media. This study addresses this gap by employing an inductive-then-deductive framing approach to compare how the news media in the UK, the US, and China visually depict the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine. The analysis shows that the way humanitarian crises are visualized in the news media is influenced by journalism culture across media systems and the geographical origins of suffering. The UK and US media perpetuate a post-humanitarian routine of cultural assimilation, while Chinese authoritarian media instrumentalize distant humanitarian crises for geopolitical purposes, both reinforcing the visual dehumanization of humanitarian vulnerability.
The study of the audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes has received relatively little scholarly attention. This article begins to ameliorate this gap in knowledge by examining how Chinese audiences legitimise their unresponsiveness to mediated victims of global disasters. Drawing upon data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants (N = 81), the study discusses the dominant regimes of justification which inform audience inactivity, the associated argumentation strategies and patterns of reasoning, and their sociocultural and ideological underpinnings. We find that decision-making about the moral justification for inactivity is influenced by state-propaganda media narratives, preferences for ideologies, perceptions of national identity and global responsibility, and geopolitical imaginations. These findings have implications for expanding the ontological horizons of distant suffering studies that are currently embedded in Western spatial and ideological dimensions, particularly in a world of crises spawned by globalisation and mediatisation.
This article aims to deconstruct the myth of technological utopianism which contends that immersive virtual reality (VR) can inevitably lead to a more moral and egalitarian world due to its promises of copresence, immediacy and transcendence in humanitarian communication. The problématique we explore is whether existing VR artifacts, as exemplars of the “ultimate empathy machine,” construct a technocratic solutionism which becomes constitutive of humanitarian crises themselves. Drawing upon empirical material from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with VR audiences in China, Germany, and the UK, the findings show that VR may easily construct a depoliticized hyperreality of intense spectacularity and trap audiences within an improper distance, thereby reworking the colonial legacies of humanitarianism while also obfuscating complex asymmetries of power and structural political exclusion. These findings have important implications for reminding humanitarian news organizations and aid agencies that they should not rely entirely on the particular affordances of VR to gain a moral bond with the distant refugee crisis.