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...