Cathy Xu

Email: cathy.xu3@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Debra Aarons, Mengistu Amberber

Cathy Xu is a current PhD candidate in the School of Humanities and Languages. Prior to the start of her PhD journey, she completed a Master of Applied Linguistics (with Excellence) and a double Bachelor degree of Arts (with Distinction) and Education at the University of New South Wales. Her research focus is language play and social media driven language change. She is especially interested in TikTok and how the platform enables social media natives to create new and fresh forms of expressions. Her research journey is closely associated with the ways in which humans engage with new technologies in social media communication. Her research aims to describe and analyse how social media play with linguistic structure and function on TikTok to present a synchronic snapshot of the early days of social media driven language change. The results of her study will be of value to the ongoing exploration of new linguistic facts, and the uniqueness of her research methodology, that is, conducting ethnography on a social media platform that utilises algorithm-based personalisation, will also serve to inform future studies that will engage with social media and be of value in the new age of social media ethnography. Cathy Xu has worked as a Research Assistant and Casual Academic in the field of linguistics. She is currently working as a tutor in the linguistics department for the joint Undergraduate and Postgraduate course 'The Use of Language'.