Todd L Sandel
Biographic Data
| ID | 119624 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Todd L Sandel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Todd L |
| FAMILY NAME | Sandel |
| SIGNATURE | SANDEL T L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Macau |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2781-0786 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 140 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Parental Involvement in Adult Children’s Marriage-Seeking Activities ( Xiangqin )
As marriage rates decline across China, parents take an active role in facilitating their child’s marriage-seeking, or xiangqin—introduced dating. This study examines the parental beliefs and gendered discourses that guide such practices. Data were collected from a WeChat group and interviews with 22 participants of unmarried young adults. Analysis was guided by thematic analysis and feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) to examine ideologi…
Cultural Domestication Is the Safeguarding
Forces of modernization and globalization threaten the survival and continuity of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Among studies on ICH digitalization, the voices of inheritors, particularly the elderly facing the challenges of aging and death, have not been fully heard in shaping digital media uses for ICH safeguarding. Situating technology domestication within ICH, this qualitative study reveals a nuanced understanding of how Chinese senior …
Personal mourning in the “home letter”
Overt conviviality and covert distress
Emotions-as-practices involve an open, embodied, and meaning-making process as digital technologies can shape and transform how emotions are enacted. This study uses the concepts of emotional affordances and affective practice in digital culture to investigate the online emotional experiences of Chinese left-behind women living in a rural location. From an analysis of Douyin (TikTok) video posts and interviews with 18 participants, the study deve…
Power” as an Identity Category in the Russian-Language Political Discourse
This paper analyses ways of speaking about politics in Russian-language political discourse by focusing on key cultural terms that describe political relationships and positionality. Data were collected from articles on Russian-language news sites and Russian-language comments on “Facebook”. The analysis shows how “power” is constructed as an identity category through oppositional codes and metonymic substitution in public political discourse. Ag…
Media representations of the 'little fresh meat' phenomenon in China
‘Little fresh meat’ (LFM or xiǎo xiān ròu), which describes a masculine aesthetic rooted in ‘soft masculinity’, is a phenomenon across Asia that challenges prevailing concepts of masculinity and patriarchal discourse. This study furthers previous research by using feminist critical discourse analysis to evaluate the construction of LFM masculine nonconformity, via data collected from 42 news articles from China’s English-language news media, incl…
Dis(playing) mediated filial norms
This study demonstrates the importance of the approach of dis(playing) families in analyzing and conceptualizing mediated filial norms in Chinese cross-border/transnational families. Based upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Macao, the study develops a conceptual framework – dis(playing) mediated filial norms – to examine how Chinese cross-border students use WeChat to reconstitute their long-distance filial practices. Findings point to a…
On Algorithmic Time and Daily Contingencies in the Lived Work of Food Delivery Service
Transforming culture through “communication” (rituals)
This article investigates how culture is transformed via public creative endeavors in modern-day Belarus. From ethnographic observations and analyses of cultural discourses, it shows how public creative practices facilitate the conditions for social and cultural change – not necessarily change to the political regime – but change that leads to the processes of creation and adaptation, or a "banalization" of recurring daily practices. These practi…
How vernacular languages create humour on China’s social media
Marriage is like Gambling
“We have a point on the map”
This paper investigates how Belarusians discursively construct a local identity of a creative people in Minsk. Drawing upon Cultural Discourse Analysis, we examine speakers’ talk at monthly meetings of CreativeMornings Minsk. Participants give voice to oppositional, cultural terms and notions about identity, acting, and relating; they build an alternative sociocultural space of togetherness that is opposed to the Belarusian state of devastation a…
Resilience and (Dis)empowerment
The role of social media in a resilient process is associated with the co-constitution of structural forces and users’ agency. During COVID-19, how women—particularly low-skilled labor migrants—used social media for empowerment is underexplored. By taking a socio-techno approach, this study qualitatively examines mobile phone-based social media usage among female mainland low-skilled workers in Macao when coping with the pandemic. The enabling ye…
(Re)making live-in or live-out choice
Migrant domestic workers’ (MDWs) out-of-home flexibility and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic open up opportunities to examine the intrinsic reasons driving their decision-making in live-in/live-out patterns. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 18 female, Filipina MDWs in Macao, the study reveals that live-in MDWs sacrifice their subjectivity to save money, whereas live-out MDWs’ create an empowering space for privacy, romantic relationships…
Mediated (Un)Doing Family
This article elucidates the emergence of technology-empowered family practices that cross-border families develop to re-spatialize and re-temporalize their family activities and daily rhythms. Standing on the concepts of 'doing family' and polymedia, we propose a dual framework of mediated doing/undoing family and explain it in an integrated WeChat environment. Specifically, the frame contains three pairs of dimensions: active versus inactive, ev…
Selling intimacy online
Chinese social media
Struggling in im/mobility
The coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) has led to drastic changes in social life. Focusing on a group of essential workers, this study examines how mainland Chinese low-skilled labor migrants discursively manifest their everyday lives via WeChat Moments. From analyzing social media posts and interview data, this study demonstrates that these labor migrants’ stay in Macao was a period of unsought and undesired time of waiting, impacted by socio-struc…
Unified or divided “we-hood”
By proposing that national identity is not stable and homogeneous, this article explores how mainland Chinese students construct a heterogeneous national identity and negotiate a unified or divided “we-hood” with both Macao locals and other mainlanders under one country, two systems model. Unified we-hood refers to an inclusive China–Chinese nationalism, while a divided we-hood is seen in how mainlanders construct the peoples of the Special Admin…
The art of honing the conscience through bukalapak ads
Culture is one of the foundations for the existence of Indonesia as a nation, as it is expressed in the second stanza of her national anthem. The government has taken an initiative to prioritize national character building, which places character education to realize the vision of national development. One of the efforts to visualize this Indonesian is constructed through a Bukalapak advertisement entitled “Barongsai Indonesia, Juara Hati Membang…
Unwelcomed Guests
This study explicates discourse on Indonesian social media pertaining to Chinese Indonesians by analyzing comments posted on Facebook. Using Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA), we show how Chinese are depicted as the “other” in Indonesian discourse. We also unpack persuasive efforts to convince readers of Chinese Indonesians’ other-ness through such rhetorical terms as cina (racial slur against Chinese Indonesians) and pribumi (native, indigenous…
Thank you for your blessing
Perceived Understandings of Home and Self-identity among Mainland Chinese Dual Migrants in Macao
This paper focuses on the meanings of home and self-identity perceived by mainland Chinese dual migrant workers in Macao. Due to the high living cost in Macao, a majority of mainland Chinese labour migrants choose to migrate daily across the Zhuhai-Macao border. Drawing upon fourteen in-depth interviews and two group discussions among low-skilled labour migrants from the mainland, findings show the co-existence of temporality and situatedness in …
Online interaction across three contexts
Students were linked virtually across three contexts: U.S., Malaysia, and China. Differences emerged in how student-created messages were constructed and interpreted; these impacted perceived relational affiliation. Messages constructed by students in Malaysia and China exhibited casual talk, greater self-disclosure, requests for personal information, and greater use of emoticons/emoji. Interactions were perceived as informal, friendly, and posit…
Understanding chinese internet and social media
In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch out a description of Chinese internetculture from its historical development through to some of its current characteristics.From the early roll out of the internet through to the use of social media Chineseinternet cutlture should be understood as emerging from the interplay of a numberof forces: technological changes, software development, user-generated interactionalpractices, and government censorsh…
Unpacking and describing interaction on Chinese WeChat
Self-Esteem as Folk Theory
Objective. Self-esteem is seldom recognized to be a culture-specific, historically situated idea, and parents' folk theories of self-esteem are rarely investigated empirically. This paper remedies these omissions by comparing European American and Taiwanese mothers' beliefs about childrearing and self-esteem. The substantive goals are to understand the variety of meanings that these mothers associate with self-esteem and to delineate the local fo…
Linguistic capital in Taiwan
From 1945 until 1987, the KMT (Nationalist) government enforced its strict Mandarin Language Policy in schools throughout Taiwan, and students were forbidden to speak local languages or dialects. Recent reversal of this policy allows schools to teach these formerly forbidden varieties. Despite some attention from scholars, it remains to explore the impact of these policies on successive generations of bilingual speakers. This study explores the p…
The Olympic Effect on American Attitudes towards China
This paper explores the impact that increased exposure to China during the two and a half weeks of the Beijing Olympics had on American attitudes towards China. A large N longitudinal survey revealed a significant increase in negative attitudes towards China from the beginning to the end of August 2008. Statistical analysis revealed no dominant explanation for this change, however. Instead, personality (openness), ideology (social dominance orien…
Narrated Relationships
In this study, I examined how mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law in Taiwan narrated relational conflicts. The data consisted of narrative practices that emerged from open-ended interviews with 16 mothers-in-law and their 16 daughters-in-law. These practices were analyzed as situated vocabularies of motives, negotiated in talk with the interviewer. Findings indicate that conflicts centered on the issue of daughters-in-law challenging the authorit…
Language Shift and Language Accommodation across Family Generations in Taiwan
This study explored language shift and accommodation among bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi (also called Hokkien, Holo, Tai-gu, Taiwan Min, Taiwanese) families in Taiwan. From the 1940s until the 1980s the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Taiwan promoted Mandarin Chinese. Recent years have witnessed a shift in policy: since 2001 elementary schools throughout Taiwan offered mother-tongue education as a way to preserve and maintain Taiwan's mother t…
What It Means to be a Grandmother
This study investigates Euro-American and Taiwanese grandmothers' folk theories of their roles, discipline, and advice giving. In each case, 16 grandmothers of 3-year-old grandchildren participated in in-depth interviews that were customized according to local communicative norms. While grandmothers in both contexts were engaged in similar tasks and perceived their roles as distinct from that of mothers, their interpretations of these tasks diffe…
Narrating Transgressions in Longwood
The goal of this study is to deepen our understanding of a set of narrative practices in European‐American families in which young children's transgressions are downplayed or erased, a pattern that is cast in relief by the frequent, foregrounded narration of young children's transgressions in Taiwanese families. Evidence from the mothers'folk theories is used to illuminate these patterns, revealing that the pattern is reversed with respect to the…
Unwelcomed Guests
This study explicates discourse on Indonesian social media pertaining to Chinese Indonesians by analyzing comments posted on Facebook. Using Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA), we show how Chinese are depicted as the “other” in Indonesian discourse. We also unpack persuasive efforts to convince readers of Chinese Indonesians’ other-ness through such rhetorical terms as cina (racial slur against Chinese Indonesians) and pribumi (native, indigenous…
Adaptation of Mainland Chinese Labour Migrants in Macao
This study explored adaptation as perceived by mainland Chinese labour migrants in Macao. Twenty-eight mainland Chinese migrant workers shared their lived experiences of crossing the Zhuhai-Macao border. Even though Macao and the mainland share cultural similarities, migrant workers did not perceive they were acculturating to the new environment. However, their personal and behavioural changes indicated other processes at work, as explained via c…
Selling intimacy online
Chinese social media
Taiwan's Fifth Ethnic Group
One of the under-studied effects of global migration has been an increase in transnational marriages. This phenomenon has greatly impacted Taiwan as women from Southeast Asian nations and Mainland China, through professional marriage brokers or personal contacts, enter into marriages with Taiwanese men. How well these women adapt to Taiwan's culture and learn its local languages is studied through the lens of two theories of intercultural communi…
Media representations of the 'little fresh meat' phenomenon in China
‘Little fresh meat’ (LFM or xiǎo xiān ròu), which describes a masculine aesthetic rooted in ‘soft masculinity’, is a phenomenon across Asia that challenges prevailing concepts of masculinity and patriarchal discourse. This study furthers previous research by using feminist critical discourse analysis to evaluate the construction of LFM masculine nonconformity, via data collected from 42 news articles from China’s English-language news media, incl…
What Do Grandmothers Think about Self‐esteem? American and Taiwanese Folk Theories Revisited
The study investigates European American and Taiwanese grandmothers’ folk theories of childrearing and self‐esteem, building on an earlier comparison of mothers from the same families. Adopting methods that privilege local meanings, we bring grandmothers’ voices into the conversation about childrearing, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of intergenerational nuances in folk theories. In each cultural case, 16 grandmothers of 3‐year‐ol…
Struggling in im/mobility
The coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) has led to drastic changes in social life. Focusing on a group of essential workers, this study examines how mainland Chinese low-skilled labor migrants discursively manifest their everyday lives via WeChat Moments. From analyzing social media posts and interview data, this study demonstrates that these labor migrants’ stay in Macao was a period of unsought and undesired time of waiting, impacted by socio-struc…
Editor’s statement
Editor’s statement: Ten years of JIIC, looking back, looking ahead
(Re)making live-in or live-out choice
Migrant domestic workers’ (MDWs) out-of-home flexibility and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic open up opportunities to examine the intrinsic reasons driving their decision-making in live-in/live-out patterns. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 18 female, Filipina MDWs in Macao, the study reveals that live-in MDWs sacrifice their subjectivity to save money, whereas live-out MDWs’ create an empowering space for privacy, romantic relationships…
The art of honing the conscience through bukalapak ads
Culture is one of the foundations for the existence of Indonesia as a nation, as it is expressed in the second stanza of her national anthem. The government has taken an initiative to prioritize national character building, which places character education to realize the vision of national development. One of the efforts to visualize this Indonesian is constructed through a Bukalapak advertisement entitled “Barongsai Indonesia, Juara Hati Membang…
Thank you for your blessing
Narrating Transgressions in Longwood
The goal of this study is to deepen our understanding of a set of narrative practices in European‐American families in which young children's transgressions are downplayed or erased, a pattern that is cast in relief by the frequent, foregrounded narration of young children's transgressions in Taiwanese families. Evidence from the mothers'folk theories is used to illuminate these patterns, revealing that the pattern is reversed with respect to the…
Self-Esteem as Folk Theory
Objective. Self-esteem is seldom recognized to be a culture-specific, historically situated idea, and parents' folk theories of self-esteem are rarely investigated empirically. This paper remedies these omissions by comparing European American and Taiwanese mothers' beliefs about childrearing and self-esteem. The substantive goals are to understand the variety of meanings that these mothers associate with self-esteem and to delineate the local fo…
Linguistic capital in Taiwan
From 1945 until 1987, the KMT (Nationalist) government enforced its strict Mandarin Language Policy in schools throughout Taiwan, and students were forbidden to speak local languages or dialects. Recent reversal of this policy allows schools to teach these formerly forbidden varieties. Despite some attention from scholars, it remains to explore the impact of these policies on successive generations of bilingual speakers. This study explores the p…
Narrated Relationships
In this study, I examined how mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law in Taiwan narrated relational conflicts. The data consisted of narrative practices that emerged from open-ended interviews with 16 mothers-in-law and their 16 daughters-in-law. These practices were analyzed as situated vocabularies of motives, negotiated in talk with the interviewer. Findings indicate that conflicts centered on the issue of daughters-in-law challenging the authorit…
What Do Grandmothers Think about Self‐esteem? American and Taiwanese Folk Theories Revisited
The study investigates European American and Taiwanese grandmothers’ folk theories of childrearing and self‐esteem, building on an earlier comparison of mothers from the same families. Adopting methods that privilege local meanings, we bring grandmothers’ voices into the conversation about childrearing, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of intergenerational nuances in folk theories. In each cultural case, 16 grandmothers of 3‐year‐ol…
What It Means to be a Grandmother
This study investigates Euro-American and Taiwanese grandmothers' folk theories of their roles, discipline, and advice giving. In each case, 16 grandmothers of 3-year-old grandchildren participated in in-depth interviews that were customized according to local communicative norms. While grandmothers in both contexts were engaged in similar tasks and perceived their roles as distinct from that of mothers, their interpretations of these tasks diffe…
Language Shift and Language Accommodation across Family Generations in Taiwan
This study explored language shift and accommodation among bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi (also called Hokkien, Holo, Tai-gu, Taiwan Min, Taiwanese) families in Taiwan. From the 1940s until the 1980s the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Taiwan promoted Mandarin Chinese. Recent years have witnessed a shift in policy: since 2001 elementary schools throughout Taiwan offered mother-tongue education as a way to preserve and maintain Taiwan's mother t…
Taiwan's Fifth Ethnic Group
One of the under-studied effects of global migration has been an increase in transnational marriages. This phenomenon has greatly impacted Taiwan as women from Southeast Asian nations and Mainland China, through professional marriage brokers or personal contacts, enter into marriages with Taiwanese men. How well these women adapt to Taiwan's culture and learn its local languages is studied through the lens of two theories of intercultural communi…
Tales of the bitter and sweet
Recent research in Taiwanese families has found that children’s transgressions are narratable and parents encourage children to confess and reflect upon their faults. Little, however, is known if adults do the same when talking with children or other adults. This study examines transgression stories from interviews with 102 adult participants in Taiwan. It finds adults often tell stories about the faults of close family members such as spouses, p…
The Olympic Effect on American Attitudes towards China
This paper explores the impact that increased exposure to China during the two and a half weeks of the Beijing Olympics had on American attitudes towards China. A large N longitudinal survey revealed a significant increase in negative attitudes towards China from the beginning to the end of August 2008. Statistical analysis revealed no dominant explanation for this change, however. Instead, personality (openness), ideology (social dominance orien…
The Code of Food and Tradition
This study examines a recognizable speech code, the code of food and tradition, as displayed among members of a Lebanese community in Flatland, located in the central United States. Based upon in-depth interviews with 20 participants and three months of participant observation at a Lebanese food festival, we identify communication that is gendered, generationally shaped, and focused on tradition. These are manifest in both beliefs and everyday pr…
“Oh, I’m Here!”
This study investigates the perceptions and interpretations of social media and online communication by students engaged in study abroad programs. In-depth interviews were conducted and analyzed with 23 American and international students who completed or were engaged in a study abroad program. Results suggest that online communication enhanced the students’ experience, providing help with sociocultural skills, informational needs, relational bon…
Language and Intercultural Communication
This chapter examines the role of language in intercultural communication. Influenced by Albert Einstein's work in relativity, M. Bakhtin thought of a novel as an utterance, or communicative expression unique because it was situated in a particular space and time. The communication scholar, Donal Carbaugh, developed cultural discourse analysis as a tool to help us understand how culture shapes communication, and how it may impact interaction. D. …
Editor’s statement
Editor’s statement: Ten years of JIIC, looking back, looking ahead
Online interaction across three contexts
Students were linked virtually across three contexts: U.S., Malaysia, and China. Differences emerged in how student-created messages were constructed and interpreted; these impacted perceived relational affiliation. Messages constructed by students in Malaysia and China exhibited casual talk, greater self-disclosure, requests for personal information, and greater use of emoticons/emoji. Interactions were perceived as informal, friendly, and posit…
Understanding chinese internet and social media
In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch out a description of Chinese internetculture from its historical development through to some of its current characteristics.From the early roll out of the internet through to the use of social media Chineseinternet cutlture should be understood as emerging from the interplay of a numberof forces: technological changes, software development, user-generated interactionalpractices, and government censorsh…
Adaptation of Mainland Chinese Labour Migrants in Macao
This study explored adaptation as perceived by mainland Chinese labour migrants in Macao. Twenty-eight mainland Chinese migrant workers shared their lived experiences of crossing the Zhuhai-Macao border. Even though Macao and the mainland share cultural similarities, migrant workers did not perceive they were acculturating to the new environment. However, their personal and behavioural changes indicated other processes at work, as explained via c…
Unpacking and describing interaction on Chinese WeChat
Unwelcomed Guests
This study explicates discourse on Indonesian social media pertaining to Chinese Indonesians by analyzing comments posted on Facebook. Using Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA), we show how Chinese are depicted as the “other” in Indonesian discourse. We also unpack persuasive efforts to convince readers of Chinese Indonesians’ other-ness through such rhetorical terms as cina (racial slur against Chinese Indonesians) and pribumi (native, indigenous…
Thank you for your blessing
Perceived Understandings of Home and Self-identity among Mainland Chinese Dual Migrants in Macao
This paper focuses on the meanings of home and self-identity perceived by mainland Chinese dual migrant workers in Macao. Due to the high living cost in Macao, a majority of mainland Chinese labour migrants choose to migrate daily across the Zhuhai-Macao border. Drawing upon fourteen in-depth interviews and two group discussions among low-skilled labour migrants from the mainland, findings show the co-existence of temporality and situatedness in …
Unified or divided “we-hood”
By proposing that national identity is not stable and homogeneous, this article explores how mainland Chinese students construct a heterogeneous national identity and negotiate a unified or divided “we-hood” with both Macao locals and other mainlanders under one country, two systems model. Unified we-hood refers to an inclusive China–Chinese nationalism, while a divided we-hood is seen in how mainlanders construct the peoples of the Special Admin…
The art of honing the conscience through bukalapak ads
Culture is one of the foundations for the existence of Indonesia as a nation, as it is expressed in the second stanza of her national anthem. The government has taken an initiative to prioritize national character building, which places character education to realize the vision of national development. One of the efforts to visualize this Indonesian is constructed through a Bukalapak advertisement entitled “Barongsai Indonesia, Juara Hati Membang…
Selling intimacy online
Chinese social media
Sociology (34 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Political science (18 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · China (12 works) · Social media (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works)