ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops
On 20–23 May 2025, SGAIN team member Dr Yitong Ye, participated in the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Prague. At the workshop “Text-as-Data Analysis in Political Science: Unlocking Political Insights with New Research Tools”, she shared our work titled “Seeing China from Different Perspectives: Analyzing Media Reporting on the Sustainability Impacts of Chinese Overseas Investments”
This study explores how competing narratives—local, Western, and Chinese—frame the sustainability impacts of Chinese global investments, particularly in Southeast Asia. Using advanced NLP methods, we developed a transformer-based classification model (XLM-RoBERTa) fine-tuned on manually labelled media reports, and also conducted time-series analysis of media stance over 2010–2024. For the next step, we will work with our colleagues at Causal Map to apply causal mapping techniques to further uncover deeper narrative dynamics and potential causal chains. She also had a fruitful exchange with fellow participants and received insightful feedback.
In the future, our SGAIN team looks forward to developing further collaboration with scholars across fields!
