City University of Hong Kong
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City University of Hong Kong
CityU Announcement Portal (CAP)

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COM Research Seminar: Shenzhen, Media-infrastructure, and the Making of the Navigational Subject by Prof Fan YANG
(POSTED: 2025-01-16 11:48 AM )
COM Research Seminar: COM Research Seminar: Shenzhen, Media-infrastructure, and the Making of the Navigational Subject by Prof Fan YANG, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Date & Time: 23 January 2025, 16:00 - 17:30. Venue: Multimedia Laboratory (M5055),5/F, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, please click https://www.cityu.edu.hk/com/Public/AppForms/StI_AppForm.aspx?id=1184 to register for the seminar by 23 January 2025. Language: English. Abstract This talk examines the making of navigational subjectivity in Shenzhen, the first Special Economic Zone established in 1980 in southern China. Focusing on the production, circulation, and consumption of key technologies that connect Shenzhen to the world beyond, from mobile phones to drones, I argue that Shenzhen is best seen as a media-infrastructure complex that integrates digital and physical spaces while straddling the forces of globalizations from “above” and “below.” Emerging from this complex is a distinctive navigational subject position that traverses the hybrid and volumetric spaces of communication networks and transportation infrastructures. Unevenly embodied by delivery workers, live streamers, tourists, and others, the navigational subjectivity captures the momentum, calculation, contention, and obstacles of many inhabiting the platformatized landscape of contemporary China. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, this talk explores the possibility of producing media theories in a non-Western locale with myriad linkages to the Global South. About the speaker: Dr. Fan Yang is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies and incoming Director of Asian Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she is affiliated with Global Studies and the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Culture. She is the author of Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (2024) and Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). An interdisciplinary scholar, Yang works at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, and contemporary China. She has published widely in media/cultural studies, China studies, global studies, and urban studies. In 2023, she helped to launch the Mellon-funded Global Asias Initiative at UMBC. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For enquiries, please call 34428677.
Category:
Academic Seminar
Department:
Department of Media and Communication (COM)
Venue:
Multimedia Laboratory (M5055),5/F, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre
Start Date:
2025-01-23 16:00
End Date:
2025-01-23 17:30
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