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Op-eds on translation activism & revolutionary narratives, plus recent talks

On Friday, October 7, 2016, I'll be giving a keynote speech at the workshop on "Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China," organized by the Asian Studies Center, the China Council, and the Film Studies Program of the University of Pittsburgh. The title of the talk is: "Enchantment and Disenchantment in the Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China."

On September 29, 2016, I gave a talk at the East Asia Center of the University of Virginia on "A Structural Transformation of the Chinese Virtual Sphere? Emotion, Reason, and Perverse Publicity."

 Abstract: This talk examines the hypothesis that the virtual sphere in Chinese cyberspace is undergoing a structural transformation in a perverted Habermasian sense. Whereas Habermas holds rational critical discourse to be the ideal in a democratic public sphere, in China today reason is mobilized as the main rhetorical resource for harnessing an emotional internet.  The transformation of the Chinese virtual sphere manifests itself as the rationalization of emotional online discourse.

 My op-ed on "The Return of Revolutionary Narratives and the Future of Revolution," posted on the Re.Framing Activism blog on September 28, 2016, begins with the following:

 Recently, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association was held in Philadelphia. The theme of the meeting was “Great Transformations: Political Science and the Big Questions of Our Time.” This sounded like a call for the return of grand narratives. A return, because there was once a time for grand narratives, and then they were pronounced dead and in their place there appeared multiple small narratives.

My op-ed on "Translation in Activism and Cyber-Nationalism in China," written for China Policy Analysis, was posted on September 22, 2016. This was my inaugural essay for CPI: Analysis as a non-resident senior fellow at the China Policy Institute of the University of Nottingham.




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