Summer Institutes in Communication & Journalism Thrive in China

Given the pandemic situation and all the problems it has created, I'm amazed at the energy of Chinese colleagues in communication studies in organizing summer institutes and workshops. Just as amazing is the enthusiasm of graduate students and emerging scholars in attending these programs - often hundreds of them if not more.

Recently I gave two virtual talks at two of these summer institutes - one for the College of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University, the other for the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou. One thing I like about these events is that the organizers would usually prepare news releases with summaries of the main points of the lectures and discussions. These news releases are published on their Schools' WeChat accounts, which are then shared quite widely. Some of the summaries are detailed enough I don't feel I need to write up the stuff for further publication.

Here is the link to one of the news releases for the "Advanced Summer Training Institute" organized by the College of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin at Madison and our own Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) at Penn: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2c66buzGP0SPQ7zcODYNaQ 

This is the 12th consecutive year colleagues at Zhejiang University have done this and the pandemic did not stop them. I talked about the descriptive turn in contemporary social sciences. My great colleague Victor Pickard talked about his book Democracy Without Journalism (which he held up for the audience to see in the inserted image). Other speakers included Seth Lewis (Oregon), David Ryfe (Iowa), Mike Ananny (USC), Yu HONG (ZhejiangU), Ye LU (FudanU), Hongtao LI (ZhejiangU), and Yanhong LI (Sun Yat-senU), Haiyan WANG (JinanU), Lu WEI (ZhejiangU), and Zhongdang Pan (Madison). Pan chaired a roundtable discussion. A number of students attending the Institute presented their own work as well.

Victor is as much of a celebrity in China as elsewhere. The academic journal Shanghai Journalism Review recently ran a wonderful (and long) interview with him here, in Chinese, of course. The same issue of the journal also ran an interview with me, where I introduced our CDCS and discussed digital culture, cultural sociology, and more.

Call for Abstracts: Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World

This call will be posted on the website of CDCS soon, but here is an early peep at an important new project of our Center.

Call for Abstracts:

Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World: Technology, Society, and Nations 

Center on Digital Culture and Society

Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania 

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and poses multiple crises to nations and humanity, our previous assumptions of community, mobility, personhood, and even society itself are called into question. Widespread border closure and travel disruptions have rendered conventional forms of sociality difficult. Lockdown, social distancing and work-from-home orders have affected different social groups in vastly different ways, with clear adverse impact on women, racial minorities, and the working poor. Pandemic narratives proliferate on social media and news networks. Individuals in different world regions articulate different if not conflictual meanings of self, community, justice, and the nation in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political elites in some nations propagate narratives of virus nationalism and populism and violently exclude and stigmatize certain social groups.

In a world troubled by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative for researchers to rework our theoretical assumptions and frameworks as we embark on new empirical and theoretical inquiries. The Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania seeks to bring together a group of scholars for an interdisciplinary workshop to examine these important issues and explore new research agendas. We particularly welcome empirical research which takes historical, critical, cultural, and political-economic approaches to the study of the following topics:

-New and radical practices and visions of technologies in the COVID-19 pandemic
-Changing narratives of borders, communities, and mobility
-The resurgence of racism and right-wing nationalism
-Gender and the crisis of social reproduction
-Evolving patterns of media/tech activism and surveillance, and their implications for future social   movements
-Narratives of identity, solidarity, emotions, personhood, social justice, and nationalism
-Artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies in economic, political and social processes
-Comparative studies of risks, vulnerabilities, and pandemic narratives across time and space

Please submit extended paper abstracts of 500-800 words in English to cdcs@asc.upenn.edu before September 1, 2020 with “COVID Workshop” in the subject line. The authors of accepted proposals will be invited to present the full paper at a workshop on March 19, 2021 hosted by the Center on Digital Culture and Society. Depending on the pandemic situation, the workshop may be virtual or in-person. If in-person, the workshop will be held at the University of Pennsylvania and organizers will cover the invited authors’ travel and accommodation. If the workshop is held virtually, organizers will pay an honorarium to invited speakers. Presented papers will be published in a special journal issue and/or as an edited book. The workshop will be co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania.

First blog since 2017

I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but I'm going to try to pick up blogging again. Last time I posted anything here was in 2017. Things have changed a little since then.

I guess part of the reason I'm switching back to good-old blogging is I'm spending less time on Twitter and even less on Facebook. I use Weibo and WeChat more, but that's in Chinese.

I don't know exactly what I'll blog about. Mostly about research, reading, writing, conferencing, and such. And my next post will be a "Call for Abstracts" for a workshop on "Narratives of COVID-19" we at the Center for Digital Culture and Society will be organizing.