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Dr. Zhe Xu

Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Associate
Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich
zhe.xu (at) lmu.de


Welcome!

My name is Zhe Xu, and I am currently a research associate and Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, affiliated with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch’s Chair of Journalism Studies and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman’s Chair of Computational Journalism (by courtesy). I am also a PI in the German Research Foundation project Global Journalism Practices in Humanitarian Crises (2024-2026). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in 2023, advised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Kramer and Prof. Dr. Martin Scott.

My research focuses on crisis and political communication in both authoritarian and democratic contexts. I use social science and computational methods to study global news production (e.g., institutional roles, AI/VR/automation in newsrooms) in humanitarian crises and their effects on policymaking and public decision-making (e.g., public moral passivity, political slacktivism, media trust). All of my work seeks to understand the (de)politicization, platformization, and algorithmization of communicating human vulnerability. Please feel free to check the full list of my publications on Google Scholar.

During my bachelor’s in engineering science, I quickly realized engineering wasn’t my path, despite my love for math. Drawn to journalism and the structural issues of social inequality, I shifted to the social sciences in the UK for my master’s degree. Now, the rise of data science and modeling in communication has reignited my passion for math. To sharpen my expertise and establish myself as a skilled computational social scientist, I have undergone extensive training in computational and data science at the University of Cologne’s CA III Quantitative Modeling of Complex Systems and the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute.

When I’m not immersed in academia, you’ll likely find me hiking, mountaineering, or bouldering with my wife and our little one in various parts of the world.

News

Selective Publications

  1. 2023
    How News Media Visually Dehumanize Victims of Humanitarian Crises through Framing Disparities: A Quantitative Comparative Analysis
    Zhe Xu, Mengrong Zhang
    International Communication Gazette, 86(8), 633-654, 2023
    Paper BibTex

  2. 2022
    The Ultimate Empathy Machine as Technocratic Solutionism? Audience Reception of the Distant Refugee Crisis through Virtual Reality
    Zhe Xu, Mengrong Zhang
    The Communication Review, 25(3-2), 181-203, 2022. Also in P. Reilly and V Salojärvi (Eds), (De)constructing Societal Threats During Times of Deep Mediatization.
    Paper BibTex As part of the IAMCR Crisis, Security, and Conflict Communication Working Group's Special Issues.

Ongoing Funded Projects as PI

  1. DFG
    Global Disparities in Journalistic Practices in Mediating Migration Crises
    Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Walter Benjamin Programme (2024-2026)
    Using computational NLP, ML, and network analysis, this 2-year project conducts an extensive, cross-national, and longitudinal analysis of news data to examine how transnational media across diverse countries use framing to portray the global migration crisis and define their journalistic roles.

Selected Working Papers

University Teaching & Supervision

Services

Invited Conference, Report & Grant Reviewers

Invited Journal Reviewers


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