Digital technologies have radically altered how people across the globe live, work, connect with others, and access information. This is particularly true for the People’s Republic of China, the country with the largest internet population in the world and one that is also at the forefront of digital innovation. Whether it’s ‘smart cities’, e-commerce, wanghong or even data collection and state surveillance, digital technologies have variously enabled, expanded or even compressed the possibilities for analogue community, activism and political engagement in China today.
This event, the third in the CCC Conferences Deconstructed, brings together leading international experts to discuss the dynamic dialectal relationship between the digital and the analogue in contemporary China. Based on their own research areas and case studies from across the field of literature, politics, and human geography, panellists will examine how digital events and debates engage with, reflect and inform the “real world”, and vice versa.
The event is open to all. A Zoom link will be provided to all those who register on Eventbrite before March 8th.
Chair: Séagh Kehoe (University of Westminster)
Speakers
Heather Inwood (University of Cambridge)
Heather Inwood is Associate Professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. Her research focuses on interactions between literature, popular culture and digital media in contemporary China. She is the author of Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, and is currently writing a book on Chinese internet fiction.
Carwyn Morris (University of Manchester)
Carwyn Morris is a postdoctoral researcher at the Manchester China Institute. A human geographer, he examines mobility and stillness across digital and physical geographies, particularly China's geographies, and considers the relationship between territory, borders and informality across digital and physical spaces. He occasionally collaborates on zines, such as Pomelo, which reflects on the 1930s Chinese women's magazine, Linglong.
Oscar Tianyang Zhou (University of Hertfordshire)
Oscar Tianyang Zhou is a lecturer in media studies at the School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire (UK). He is interested in digital cultures and communications in a transnational context, including but not limited to media and technology in everyday life, queer digital cultures and activism, critical big data and algorithm studies, Chinese media and politics, as well as feminist media studies.
