Is There a Crisis of Narration? Narrative Imagination on Chinese Social Media
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Guobin Yang, Communication and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Coach House, Green College, UBC and livestreamed
Tuesday, March 18, 5-6:30 pm, with reception to followin the series
Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor -
Amidst the rising concern about a crisis of narration in global digital culture, this talk reclaims the work of narrative imagination, with a focus on civic storytelling on Chinese social media. In today’s platform society, social media platforms often obstruct the telling and sharing of some stories while promoting others. In response, social media users mobilize their work of narrative imagination - the capacity to tell stories using creative and artistic forms. This talk analyzes forms of narrative imagination on Chinese social media in recent years to show the possibilities of grassroots world-making under conditions of commercial and state-sponsored platformization. By remixing fact and fiction in iterative processes of networked participation, social media users turn information scraps and narrative fragments into intensified and prolonged social and artistic experiences, leading to new perception and action.
This lecture has been co-organized with Dr, Renren Yang from Asian Studies.
Guo
bin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (2022). His current research focuses on civic storytelling, digital memory, and the digital politics of emotions.
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