Ding focuses on the subjective dimensions of globalization and examines the dominant social imaginary and the ontologies of modern time and space that underpin the general sense of the global. Her recent research has primarily challenged social imaginaries about the authenticity of the nationhood. The sentiment of nationality gives factual and normative assumptions to the social imaginary through political expressions and creates coherent and enduring ways of making statements in terms of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. In the face of the current complexities of global mobility, there is a constant disjuncture within the traditional monolingualism structure of the statements.
Ding uses meta-models as methodology for discourse analysis of the interwoven processes of mobility and migration. She questions the function of traditional cultural symbols within a transnationalism framework in order to examine the theft and simplification of the plurality and fluidity of cultural subjectivity. She employs physical simulations of light and shadow reflections within 3D software to narrate the unconscious performativity of social imaginary, while using mechanical movement to retell the processes by which individual lived experiences are adjusted and occur within ' imaginary ' instructions.
