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.