Zikun Liu

Zikun Liu is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student at the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Her research interest is cultural sociology and risk communication.

The research she did in “Metaphors in the Memorial Reports of Wenchuan Earthquake” and “News Frames and Disaster Narratives of Six Major Accidents in China” have already been published. She has found that Chinese mass media catered to the grand narrative of the country and strengthened political, cultural, and social identity through the use of metaphors, and the “individually interpreted” disaster narrative downplays the impact of the accident on the overall social order, constituting a kind of disaster construction strategy that is both newsworthy effectiveness and politically correctness. She is currently working on exploring the memorial ceremony in Chinese major disasters.