Meng Li

Dr. Meng Li is an ethnographer and a cultural analyst. Combining interpersonal/family communication and media studies, her research has centered on issues of family change, social inequality, and rural-urban migration in China. She has studied, for example, family and relational communication in Chinese rural-urban migrant families, public discourses and media representations of family issues, and shifts in mobility cultures, infrastructures, and politics in China. She is currently investigating the diffusion of the family of origin (原生家庭) discourse from Western family therapy to Chinese popular culture.

Dr. Li’s scholarly work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Family Communication, Family Relations, Communication, Culture & Critique, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and Journalism, among others. In addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals, Dr. Li has written for public audiences on issues of migration and mobility in both English and Chinese. She received two distinguished dissertation fellowships for her ethnographic research in China on rural migrant workers’ annual family reunions during the Chinese Lunar New Year. Her scholarly work has won multiple top paper awards from the National Communication Association (NCA), including, most recently, the Top Paper from the Family Communication Division in 2021.

Dr. Li regularly teaches communication theory and research and courses in the Department’s Relational Communication concentration, such as Relational Communication, Relationships in Context, Global Intimacies, Family and Inequality, and Relational Communication Capstone.