Bio: (1954-) Dutch-Australian scientist of cultural studies. Ien Ang holds a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam and is currently teaching in Australia at the University of West Sydney. She is one of the world's leading scientists in the field of cultural studies. Her areas of interest are media and cultural consumption, identity politics, nationalism, and ethnicity, as well as globalization. In the book Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), she presents a "structured interpretive model" of the analysis of the relationship between the media and their audience. The messages sent by the media can be interpreted in different ways, but there is always one way of understanding the message that the media themselves impose as the most important and preferred. On the other hand, it is wrong to look at the whole audience uniformly, because there are different segments of the audience that have their own needs and preferences. These segments differ in age, gender, class, geographic region, religion, or belonging to a particular subculture. Ang also studied modern Asia countries, as well as relations between Australia and Asia.

Main works

Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (1985);

Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991);

Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (1996);

Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture (2000);

On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (2001);

The SBS Story (2008);

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? (2016);  

Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China (2019).