Monday, September 26, 2016

Two-day workshop, "The Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China", October 7 and 8 at Pitt.



The University of Pittsburgh will host a two-day workshop, "The Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China", on October 7 and 8.
Digital media, and the Internet in particular, have fundamentally and irreversibly changed daily life in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, current approaches to the politics of digital culture, which are often firmly based on examples from the West, largely fail to comprehensively address the multifaceted situations in digital-age China, whose unique and contradictory position between post-Socialism and neoliberal Globalism has remarkably complicated the contested relations between control and freedom, between the technological and the socio-political. To engage with these problems, this workshop brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including political science, law, film studies, communications, anthropology, and sociology, to broaden the theoretical and methodological scopes that may adequately address existing and emergent political questions regarding China’s burgeoning digital culture. The workshop examines how relatively ordinary occurrences, the everyday censorship of political or non-political content, the decision to circumvent the great firewall, posting a legal question online, or reading pollution-monitoring microblogs, creates China’s digital political culture in diverse and distributive manners. Engaging with both the macro-social and the microindividual, the papers in this workshop draw on a variety of methods including big data, interviews, surveys, archival research, close readings, and critical theory to interrogate digital political life in China, which is simultaneously rich and restricted, diverse and particular, connected and isolated.
Presenters hail from nine different universities, including the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and the Friday and Saturday events will be held in the University Club at 123 University Pl. in Oakland (map).

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