Jenny Chio
  • Home
  • About
  • Films
  • Publications
    • A Landscape of Travel
    • Articles, Chapters, Commentaries
  • Teaching
  • News

Theorizing in/of Ethnographic film

7/21/2020

 
My newly published essay, "Theorizing in/of Ethnographic Film," is available as a free download from Routledge!

The chapter is part of the wide-ranging Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video, which examines the current state of ethnographic media-making from theoretical and practical perspectives. My chapter is motivated by a series of overly ambitious questions regarding the state of ethnographic film in contemporary anthropology and cognate disciplines. Namely, what are the methodological, epistemological, and conceptual relationships between ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic theorymaking today? How can ethnographic film help produce, or at least help inform, better ethnography, and vice versa? And, perhaps most importantly, how can ethnographers, filmmakers, and ethnographic filmmakers go about actually doing better at whatever it is that they seek to do (producing social scientific knowledge, film, or some combination thereof )?

Social Media and Social Distancing: MLC Lecture 2020

6/29/2020

 
From May to July 2020, I was a returning fellow at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. Although the fellowship was held virtually, due to travel restrictions and the global COVID-19 pandemic, it was nonetheless a wonderful opportunity to think about and discuss portraiture, life-writing, and questions of representation with an amazing group of fellows. My MLC lecture, on social media and social distancing, is available online.
Picture



An Archive for Now: Portraiture, Social Media and Social Distancing
Virtual MLC Lecture held via Zoom on 29 June 2020
Watch the lecture here!

Lecture abstract:
This talk will reflect on some interconnections between social media and social distancing that have emerged over the past six months or so. In places where relatively high-speed Internet access is assumed to be accessible, much of social life has moved online (making infrastructural and economic inequalities unavoidably obvious). Socializing in a time of social distancing now appears as a series of portraits. Faces flicker and sometimes freeze. Heads and shoulders appear and disappear in the windows of a Zoom meeting. Comments and chats stand in for conversation. Video cameras turned off now come across as disengagement or, worse, refusal. Quarantine photographs turn everyday items into portrait props; backgrounds reveal commonalities and inequalities. The vertical smartphone camera frame captures bodies and faces, the former aggravatingly small and the latter uncomfortably close. But at the same time, this increased reliance on social media has spurred widespread desires to build an archive, for now, of life in the time of COVID-19, perhaps as a way to make sense and maintain some control. Countless projects to record and remember, and to create and collect, are underway at universities, museums, and other public institutions around the globe. What, then, does a portrait of social distancing look like, and what might it mean, in a moment when collective memory is driven by social media?

Tourism and Race

6/6/2020

 
Picture
Race is a topic that must be talked about -- that much has been made painfully clear in the last days, weeks, months, and years. While issues of policing, structural violence, and institutionalized racism are absolutely vital to unpack and rethink, it's also critical to examine how race informs and shapes aspects of our collective social lives that might, at first, seem less relevant.

I am grateful to be a part of a discussion on tourism and race, which has just been published in the Journal of Tourism History. Moreover, I am humbled to be in the company of a number of amazing scholars whose work directly investigates and critiques the history and persistence of racism and injustice in contemporary tourism (and tourism studies).

Read the discussion here.

COVID-19, In the Clouds

5/5/2020

 
Picture
In March 2020, I was a part of a lively online panel on COVID-19 and online sociality, organized by Ph.D. students Kaiyang Xu (USC) and Shiqi Lin (UC Irvine). As the organizers explain,

<<Drawing inspiration from “cloud clubbing,” a creative practice engaged by self-quarantined Chinese web users during the pandemic, this “cloud panel” was an experimental endeavor to discuss digital media, societal fears, and the responsibility of humanities scholars in a time of crisis. The panel brought together scholars working on biopolitics, media studies, video ethnography, urban studies, diaspora studies, and Chinese cultural studies to discuss the sources of pandemic anxieties; humor, care and intimacy animated by creative uses of social media; and the implications of social media in border-crossing. As the spread of the pandemic coincided with a transitional period of remote teaching in academia, the panel was also set up as a space for exploring alternative modes of intellectual collaboration during the pandemic.>>

The transcript of the panel, featuring short essays and our Q&A with Kaiyang, Shiqi, Belinda Kong (Bowdoin) and Carlos Rojas (Duke), is now published online by the MCLC Resource Center.

Open Access, Crowds, and Labor

2/6/2020

 
It's been a very long time since my last post! Here are some highlights from the past year:

**My ethnography of tourism and rural social change in ethnic China, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, is now open access, thanks to UW Press in collaboration with Manifold. You can read the entire book online, along with all of the books in the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.

**In 2019, I published an article on the politics of bodies, crowds, and festivals in Miao vernacular media in the journal Current Anthropology. This publication includes five scholarly commentaries by anthropologists working in China and media studies, as well as my response to their ideas and critiques.

**I was invited to write a commentary on the Oscar-nominated documentary, American Factory, for Docalogue.com, a website devoted to generating conversations about contemporary documentary film. Feel free to join the dialogue on labor, culture, and globalization through the site.
PictureThe festival crowd. Video still from the DVD Gan'nangxiang, by videographer Xiao Wen.




    Archives

    June 2022
    April 2021
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    February 2020
    December 2018
    August 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    November 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013

    Categories

    All
    2013
    2014
    2015
    2016
    2017
    2018
    2019
    2020
    2021
    Aaa
    A Landscape Of Travel
    CFP
    Conference Papers
    Fieldwork
    Publications
    Reviews
    Talks
    Teaching
    These Days
    These Homes
    农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness
    农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness
    农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness

    RSS Feed

University of Southern California   |  Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures   |    jchio@usc.edu