A new review of my book, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, is now out in the latest issue of American Anthropology (volume 118, issue 3), written by Yujie Zhu, a specialist on tourism and cultural heritage in China. In his review, Zhu summarizes some of the central arguments of my work. He writes that in my analysis, "The integration of mobility and visuality adds texture and complexity to the question of how ethnic tourism becomes commonplace in the daily lives of Chinese ethnic minority villages....More importantly, tourism not only affects villagers as an impetus of economic development but also becomes a new form of culture that influences the local value system, expectations, and visions of life." I am really grateful for the continued attention that my book is receiving from anthropologists, tourism scholars, and China studies scholars. Tourism as a form of development continues to be promoted throughout rural, ethnic minority regions of China, and it's vital to maintain a long-term research perspective on the impacts that tourism may have on local lives and livelihoods. Equally, I think it's critical to keep an eye open to the other, emerging opportunities and ambitions that rural ethnic Chinese villagers may want to pursue, particularly given the national push towards rural urbanization in many regions and changing patterns of labor migration throughout the country. Later this year, I will be taking up a one year fellowship at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies, at the University of Cologne, Germany. Naturally, I'm very excited and grateful for this opportunity to spend a dedicated year at a humanities-focused research center, where I'll be working on my next film project, "These Days, These Homes." Given that the theme of the research year will be life writing, biography, and portraiture, I look forward to dialogues and conversations with the other fellows about the processes and practices of representing life experience and life histories through visual arts, film, and/or text.
For a bit more information about the film project I'm working on, see my previous blog post here. The new year has started with a rush! At Emory, I'm excited to be teaching my China anthropology course again, which has been updated with some new materials and will feature a guest lecture by two Chinese scholar-filmmakers from Yunnan in April. I'm also running a new graduate seminar, "Heritage and Power" with a great, multi-disciplinary group of students from across the university.
Moreover, I've just settled the dates for a number of public talks, seminars, and film screenings over the course of the spring in Montreal, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The dates and titles are below, and further details will follow: February 15, 2016 Digital Ethnography and Community Media Graduate Seminar, Concordia University February 16, 2016 Buffalo, Wrangler, Videographer: Vernacular Media and the Afterlives of Bullfights in Southwest China Public Talk, Global Emergent Media Lab, Concordia University March 5, 2016 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness Film screening and discussion, USC-RAI Ethnographic Film Festival in Los Angeles, Center for Visual Anthropology, University of Southern California (USC) March 7, 2016 These Days, These Homes: The Process of a Film-in-Progress Graduate Seminar, Center for Visual Anthropology, USC March 11-25, 2016 Cultural Anthropology Screening Room (Online) Review and filmmaker Q&A with online access to my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness April 2, 2016 Collaboration and Power: The Politics of Community Media in China and Taiwan Roundtable discussion, Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Seattle April 4, 2016 Documenting Development in China: Community Media in Tibetan Qinghai Screenings and discussion of community media projects from Qinghai, China, Center for Chinese Studies, UCLA April 5, 2016 From Our Eyes: Community Media and Visual Ethnography in China Screenings and discussion, East Asian Studies Center and the Department of Anthropology, USC May 19, 2016 All Together Now: Ethnic Crowds and Vernacular Media in 'Minority' China Culture, Power, and Social Change Seminar, sponsored by Anthropology and the Center for Chinese Studies, UCLA June 19-22, 2016 Participatory Modernity: Vernacular Media in Ethnic China Paper presentation in a panel, "From Whose Eyes, In Whose Name? Interrogating Rural Media, Anthropological Knowledge, and Ethnographic Expertise in China and Taiwan," accepted for the 2016 Society for East Asian Anthropology Conference in Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong |
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