Mai Nou Xiong-Gum

Mai Nou Xiong-Gum

Assistant Professor, Communication Studies

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Dr. Mai Nou Xiong-Gum is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University, where she teaches courses that explore the intersections of media, rhetoric, and power. Her classes range from introductory courses like Public Speaking, Media & Society, Digital Storytelling, and Technofeminism to upper-level courses on Civic Media, International Women’s Rhetoric, Mobile Media, Cultural Rhetorics, and Internet & Society. In her classes, she invites students to analyze how media practices are rhetorical, and how access to media and the infrastructures that support them are unevenly distributed.

Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Rhetoric Review, Kairos, Communication Theory, Mobile Media & Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Dr. Xiong-Gum joined the Furman faculty in 2020 as a Mellon Fellow for the Humanities and Social Sciences after earning her Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media from North Carolina State University. Currently, she serves as the faculty advisor for Furman’s Lambda Pi Eta chapter, mentoring students in academic and professional development. She especially enjoys Study Away programs and has had the profound pleasure of studying with students in Spain, Morocco, and Thailand.

Honors & Rewards

  • Faculty Engagement Fellow - Center for Liberal Arts and AI, 2025-2026 (ACS Inter-Institutional Collaboration)
  • Cothran Faculty Seminar Fellow - Furman University, 2023-3024 (Coorymeela, Northern Ireland)
  • Rinker Faculty Fellow for Study Away - Furman University, 2023
  • Best Paper Award - SIGDOC, Association for Computing Machinery, 2022 (Boston, MA, USA)
  • Mellon Fellow - Furman University, 2020-2023
  • Top Papers - Mobile Communication Interest Group, International Communication Association, 2020 (Gold Coast, Australia)

Education

  • Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, Digital Media, North Carolina State University
  • M.A. in English, Western Carolina University
  • B.A. in Political Science and French, University of North Carolina (Asheville)

Research Interests

Dr. Xiong-Gum is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of rhetoric, media studies, critical mobilities research, and feminist theory. She investigates how media and mobilities shape the ways people communicate belonging, negotiate space, and participate in public life when access to both mobilities and communication are unequal.

Her research follows both mobile subjects (those who can and cannot engage in movements across spaces) and mobile-media subjects (those who engage in mediated movements through the circulation of information, digital spaces / platforms, and networked communication). By bringing these spheres together, she traces how hybrid mobilities intertwine, revealing the infrastructures, information communication technologies, and cultural forces that shape everyday life, and demonstrating how access to mobilities and communication systems enable or restrict participation in both public life and communication.

Her work expands communication studies by revealing how mobilities itself operates as a communicative practice—one that both reflects and reshapes space, legibility, and determines participants.

 

Publications

  • de Souza e Silva, Adriana & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. (2023). (Eds.) Special Issue: COVID-19 Now and Then: Reflections on Mobile Communication and the Pandemic. Mobile Media & Communication, 11(2), 1-16.

 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles:

 

  • Xiong-Gum, Mai Nou. (2025). Theorizing refuge as refusal: Ethical World-Making through Khuv xim, Muaj chaw, and Ua Ib Siab. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 22(2), 165-179.
  • Roberts, Laura & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. (2022). Vandal Fighting as Connective Intelligence: Analyzing Edits to the “2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine” Wikipedia Article. Proceedings of the 40th Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC '22). [Recipient of Best Paper Award]
  • de Souza e Silva, Adriana & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. (2021). Mobile networked creativity: Developing a theoretical framework for understanding creativity as survival. Communication Theory, 30(4), 1-20.
  • Gollihue, Krystin & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. (2020). Dataweaving: Textiles as data materialization [Interactive Web-text]. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy, 25(1).
  • Sackey, Donnie, Casey Boyle, Mai Nou Xiong, Kristin Arola, Gabriela Rios & Scot Barnett (2019). Secrets and Mattering: A Posthuman Approach to the Plain of Jars, in Perspectives on Cultural and Posthumanist Rhetorics. Rhetoric Review, 38(4), 375-401.
  • Xiong-Gum, Mai Nou. (2019). Place as interface, sensory-data, and phronesis. The Proceedings of the Annual Computers and Writing Conference 2018, 2(1), 65-74.

 

Peer Reviewed Conference Proceedings:

 

  • Xiong-Gum, Mai Nou & JeongHyun Lee (2023). Complicating the Progress Rhetoric of Digital Inclusion: The Case of South Korea and Data-Traces Obtained from Mobile Media Data. In, Mobile Media During the Pandemic: Four Scenarios to Help us Imagine a Mobile Media Future Towards Liberation. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2022.
  • de Souza e Silva, Adriana, Kelsey Dufresne & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. Decolonizing Creativity: A Crowdsourcing Project about Creativity as Survival. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2022.

 

Book Reviews:

 

  • Xiong-Gum, Mai Nou. (2020). Review of Mobile Communication and low-skilled migrants’ acculturation to cosmopolitan Singapore by Rajiv George Aricat & Rich Ling. International Journal of Communication, 14, 4003-4006.

 

Works in Progress:

 

  • de Souza e Silva, Adriana & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. (under contract, forthcoming Fall 2026). Mobile Networked Creativity: The politics of mobile networked practices. MIT University Press.

 

Media Projects:

 

  • de Souza e Silva, Adriana & Mai Nou Xiong-Gum. (2022). Mobile Networked Creativity Repository [Crowdsource Database] https://mobilenetworkedcreativity.pubpub.org, shifting to https://mobilecreativity.net after publication of with MIT University Press.
  • Roberts, Laura, Mai Nou Xiong-Gum & Matt Halm. (2019). Continuing the Conversation of Rhetoric’s Keywords [Video featuring, Kristin Arola, Casey Boyle, Karma Chávez, Byron Hawk, Chris Ingraham, and Carolyn Miller]. Available from, https://vimeo.com/329912679.

 

Additional Professional Activities

  • International Communication Association
  • National Communication Association
  • Southern States Communication Association
  • Association of Internet Researchers
  • Rhetoric Society of America

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