Prof Tom McDonald
Associate Professor
9.14, 9/F., The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus
I am a digital anthropologist dedicated to using ethnographic engagement to understand how digital technologies, media and material culture come to mediate ongoing transformations in the communicative practices, economic behaviours, social relationships and human subjectivities of people in China and beyond. I joined the HKU Department of Sociology in August 2015. Prior to this I was a Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology, University College London.
My research is centred on economic issues, particularly on the growing integration of digital currency and media in China and globally. I have conducted various significant projects in this field, such as investigating how digital payment and consumer finance platforms influence the financial identities of blue-collar workers in China, exploring the social consequences of cross-border money transactions, and studying the impact of NFTs on the collection, exchange, and production processes in the Hong Kong art market.
At present, I am heading a long-term research initiative, funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, that delves into the cultural shifts and sociotechnical imaginaries linked to Hong Kong’s evolution into a global centre for Web3 technologies.
PhD Anthropology
University College LondonMRes Anthropology
University College LondonBSc Anthropology
University College LondonAnthropology
Blockchain
China
Credit/debt
Communications
Digital money
Internet
Moral economies
Social media
Web3
Value, policy and infrastructure: Hong Kong’s Web3 visions and experimental futures ( Principal Investigator, Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund)
Chinese Podcasting Cultures: Communities, Apps and Economies (Principal Investigator, Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund)
Awards:
HKU Faculty of Social Sciences, Research Output Award for Basic Research (2019-20)
HKU Early Career Teaching Award (2018)
HKU Faculty of Social Sciences, Outstanding Teaching Award (2017-18)
Honours:
Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute (2012)
Member, European Association of Social Anthropologists (2014)
Fellow, Higher Education Academy (2019)
Journal articles:
McDonald, T. (Forthcoming) Liquid platforms: Theorising the new digital economy. Platforms & Society.
McDonald, T., & Chow L. (2023). Data by design: Shaping data-producing subjectivities through self-tracking. The Information Society. 39 (4), 213-224.
Rao, Y., & McDonald, T. (2023). Debt at a distance: Counter-collection strategies and financial subjectivities of China’s working-class defaulters during COVID-19. Economy and Society. 52 (2), 250-273.
McDonald, T. & Li, D. (2022). “Pulling the sheep’s wool”: The labour of online thrift in a Chinese factory. Journal of Consumer Culture. 22 (2), 398-416.
McDonald, T. & Horst, H. (2021). Introduction: Imaginaries of Asian Media Infrastructures. Media International Australia. 181 (1), 3-6.
McDonald T., Shum H. H-K., Wong R. (2021). Payments in the pandemic: orchestrating and imagining cross-boundary digital money infrastructures in China during COVID-19. Media International Australia. 181 (1), 44-56.
McDonald, T. & Guo, Y. (2021). “What would happen if you can’t see your money?”: Visibility and the emergent infrastructures of digital money storage in China. New Media and Society. 23 (4), 715-731.
McDonald, T. & Li, D. (2020). Alipay’s ‘Ant Credit Pay’ meets China’s factory workers: The depersonalisation and re-personalisation of online lending. Journal of Cultural Economy. 14 (1), 87-100.
McDonald, T. (2020). ‘Social’ money and working-class subjectivities: Digital money and migrant labour in Shenzhen, China. The China Quarterly. 242, 397-417.
McDonald, T. (2019). Strangership and social media: Moral imaginaries of gendered strangers in rural China. American Anthropologist. 121 (1), 76-88.
Miller, D., et al. (2019). Contemporary comparative anthropology – The Why We Post project. Ethnos. 84 (2), 283-300.
McDonald, T. (2016). Senses, sociality and salons: Medicinal hospitality in a Chinese hair-dresser’s salon. Ethnos, 81 (2), 189-213.
Chan, J.H., et al. (2016). The role of self-gentrification in sustainable tourism: Indigenous entrepreneurship at Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site, China. Journal of Sustainable Tourism. 24 (8-9), 1262-1279.
McDonald, T. (2015). Affecting relations: domesticating the internet in a south-western Chinese town. Information, Communication & Society, 18 (1), 17-31.
McDonald, T. (2011). “Cowboy Cloth” and kinship: The closeness of denim consumption in a south-west Chinese city. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 9 (1), 76-89.
Books:
McDonald, T. (2016). Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks. London: UCL Press.
Miller, D., et al. (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. London: UCL Press.
Book chapters:
McDonald, T., Shum, H. H. K., Wong, K. C. (2022). ‘Mediated money and social relationships among Hong Kong cross-boundary students’. In Costa, E., P. G. Lange, N. Haynes, J. Sinanan (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. London: Routledge. 301-313.
McDonald, T., et al. (2018). ‘Negotiating the ethics of gendered online spaces in Mainland China and Hong Kong’. In Iphofen, R and M. Tolich (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics. London: Sage. 526-539.
McDonald, T. & Sinanan, J. (2017). ‘Ethnography’. In Burgess, J., A. Marwick and T. Poell (eds), The Sage Handbook of Social Media, London: Sage. 179-195.
McDonald, T., Nicolescu, R., & Sinanan, J. (2017). ‘Small places turned inside out: social networking in small communities’. In Hjorth, L., H. Horst, A. Galloway and G. Bell (eds), The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, London: Routledge. 89-101.
McDonald, T. (2015). ‘Desiring mobiles, desiring education: mobile phones and families in a rural Chinese Town‘. In S. S. Lim (Ed.), Mobile Communication and the Family: Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication. Dordrecht: Springer. 13-32.