Hi there, welcome to my homepage! I'm Abby QIN Youran (秦悠然). My parents picked my Chinese name "悠 (yōu) 然 (rán)" (carefree) from a hermit's poem, hoping I could free myself from normative expectations and live an authentic life. I have always been striving for that.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. Meanwhile, I am the research director of the Communication Addressing Poverty (CAP) Lab at Cornell University.

My research examines how journalism and information systems shape democratic life across three levels: individual lived experience, local information ecosystems, and institutional design. 

• At the individual level, I study how people living in poverty and precarity encounter political communication and participate in — or withdraw from — civic life. 

• At the community level, I analyze how contextual features — local information infrastructure and partisan media environments — structure the possibilities for civic expression, including voting and social movements. 

• At the macro level, I conduct cross-national research on trust in journalism to examine how socioeconomic conditions, press freedom, and institutional reforms shape prospects for media credibility and inform strategies for journalistic repair. 

Taken together, I seek to offer a multi-level account of how information systems enable or constrain democratic participation.

I earned my doctoral degree in Mass Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with two doctoral minors in Cartography & Geographical Information Systems and Sociology respectively. 

Outside of research, you’ll usually find me working on my novel or cooking for the people I care about ❤️