Tommy Tse is Associate Professor in the Television and Cross-Media Culture (TVCMC) program at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the HKU Global China Social Research Hub, and the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University as an Honorary Associate Professor (2022 – 2025). He specialises in East Asia’s media and cultural industries, creative labour, consumer culture and sociology of fashion. As an ethnographer, Tse explores the intricate inner working of cultural production and consumption in Hong Kong, China, South Korea (and recently East Africa) through “walking their walks, talking their talks”. The sociocultural specificity of his research fills a significant research gap between theory and practice of the predominantly ‘Western-centric’ studies of cultural production, mediation and consumption. In 2022, Tse received the prestigious European Research Council's Consolidator Grant (ERC CoG) for his 5-year multi-sited ethnographic project entitled "China (Africa) Fashion Power - Fashioning Power through South-South Interaction: Re-thinking Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation and Consumer Agency along China-Africa Fashion Value Chains".
Before joining UvA, Tse taught at six different institutions: the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong; Faculty of Social Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong; School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University; Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; the Culture and Media Domain, HKU SPACE CC; and Hong Kong Design Institute. Over the years, Tse also worked as a project-based copywriter for various global fashion, luxury and pharmaceutical brands. In 2015, Tse was the Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Radio and Television Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing, and at the Fashion Institute of Design, Donghua University, Shanghai. Among hundreds of applicants around the world, Tse was shortlisted as one of the 30 "Dreamers" participating in the Alibaba Global Dreamers Programme in Hangzhou, China in Summer 2018. In Fall 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar/Research Associate at University College London (Anthropology Department) and London College of Fashion (Social and Cultural Studies). He is an elected member of the Amsterdam Young Academy (2020 - 2022). He is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Fashion Studies (2023 – 2026), and he also serves the Editorial Board of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture (2021 – 2024) and Work, Employment and Society (2021 – 2024). His work has appeared in European Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage), Information, Communication and Society (Taylor & Francis), Journal of Consumer Culture (Sage), Journal of Cultural Economy (Taylor & Francis), New Media & Society (Sage) and Sociology (Sage).
For details, see: https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/s/h.l.t.tse/h.l.t.tse.html