From revealing to subverting: A design inquiry into the display of academic titles and power reproduction on Douyin (Chinese TikTok)

This paper examines graphic design as a critical mode of inquiry into the performative deployment of academic titles on Douyin (Chinese TikTok) and the unequal power relations they produce. Situated within the Chinese socio-historical context of degree-based authority, the study constructs a visual-textual dataset from study vlogs by 30 anonymised influencers. Adopting a research-through-design approach, the study reworks ‘grabbing, scraping, hunting, and per­forming’ into a research protocol through which habitus-informed visual analysis and design intervention become co-constitutive. By appropriating Douyin’s automated image-recognition function as a design-critical tool, the inquiry develops into a printed-web visual essay. This artefact functions as a materially situated epistemic device in which text–image narratives, sequencing, and binding structure reading conditions and knowledge production, rendering platform-mediated academic authority perceptible and speculatively reconfiguring its power asymmetries. By positioning graphic design as a dual agent of inquiry and intervention, the study extends the discipline’s role in socio-digital critique.