Huang-Wei (Korys) Chang

Korys holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the National Cheng Kung University and a Master’s in Building and Planning from the National Taiwan University. Before joining DPU, Korys practiced as a registered architect and urban planner in Taiwan and mainland China for more than five years. Apart from this design and planning oriented professionality, Korys worked for the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund, facilitating bilateral infrastructure funding projects in Indonesia and Swaziland as a project manager. Korys’s PhD research focuses on an exploration of the social and economic dynamics stimulated by young generations in a declining rural locality. This focus is contextualised by the digital age which generates puzzling isomorphisms. Grounded in Pinglin, a dwindling and aging tea town in Taiwan, Korys aims to uncover the untold stories and latent networks behind the “Tea Generation”, an association of tea growers and producers with a distinct social media presence. His research, while examining the unmapped overlap between the ancient crafts of tea growing and new communities expressed over social media, has already identified a revitalisation of Pinglin as young people return to social and cultural origins. Based on in-depth interviews and techniques borrowed from virtual ethnography, Korys hopes to bring a fresh analysis to the topography of the local tea industry and to investigate correlations with local institutions, intergenerational interactions and technical transitions. This research will explore and enrich understandings of young farmers’ struggles and strategies in a digitally mediated.
rural reality.

Thesis title:
The new ethos of dynamic sharing in the contexts of tradition, locality and social media platforms: A radical synergy for the tea community in Pinglin, Taiwan

Keywords:
Intergenerational gap, institutional integration, rural development, social media, the Tea Generation, Taiwan