2025

Birth Tourism and Cultural Narratives

Adele Hu, supervised by Erin Amann Holliday-Karre

Project Introduction

This course project investigates how birth tourism and U.S. birthright citizenship are narrated across Chinese and English-language social media. Using crawler tools, I collected and cleaned user-generated data from platforms including Xiaohongshu, X, Facebook, and Weibo using Python-based workflows, used large language models to assist multilingual translation, and conducted qualitative coding and thematic analysis in NVivo.

The project compares how platform environments shape different narratives of migration, citizenship, reproductive mobility, and belonging. In particular, it examines how platform affordances, recommendation systems, and governance structures influence not only what users discuss, but also the emotional and political frameworks through which birth tourism becomes intelligible.

More broadly, the project considers social-media platforms as active participants in the production of cultural and political narratives rather than as neutral containers for public opinion.

2025

Birth Tourism and Cultural Narratives

Adele Hu, supervised by Erin Amann Holliday-Karre

Project Introduction

This course project investigates how birth tourism and U.S. birthright citizenship are narrated across Chinese and English-language social media. Using crawler tools, I collected and cleaned user-generated data from platforms including Xiaohongshu, X, Facebook, and Weibo using Python-based workflows, used large language models to assist multilingual translation, and conducted qualitative coding and thematic analysis in NVivo.

The project compares how platform environments shape different narratives of migration, citizenship, reproductive mobility, and belonging. In particular, it examines how platform affordances, recommendation systems, and governance structures influence not only what users discuss, but also the emotional and political frameworks through which birth tourism becomes intelligible.

More broadly, the project considers social-media platforms as active participants in the production of cultural and political narratives rather than as neutral containers for public opinion.

2025

Birth Tourism and Cultural Narratives

Adele Hu, supervised by Erin Amann Holliday-Karre

Project Introduction

This course project investigates how birth tourism and U.S. birthright citizenship are narrated across Chinese and English-language social media. Using crawler tools, I collected and cleaned user-generated data from platforms including Xiaohongshu, X, Facebook, and Weibo using Python-based workflows, used large language models to assist multilingual translation, and conducted qualitative coding and thematic analysis in NVivo.

The project compares how platform environments shape different narratives of migration, citizenship, reproductive mobility, and belonging. In particular, it examines how platform affordances, recommendation systems, and governance structures influence not only what users discuss, but also the emotional and political frameworks through which birth tourism becomes intelligible.

More broadly, the project considers social-media platforms as active participants in the production of cultural and political narratives rather than as neutral containers for public opinion.