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. 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? 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. As of August 2018, I'm now based at the University of Southern California, as Visiting Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Moving from Atlanta to Los Angeles took up most of the summer, but now the semester has begun at USC and it's full steam ahead. I'm excited to be teaching a First-Year Seminar titled "Nation, Culture, and Power in East Asia" as well as a graduate seminar on Media Ethnography and Chinese Visual Culture. USC has a vibrant visual studies and visual anthropology community as well, and I recently spoke as a discussant for the opening "back to school" event in the Visual Studies Research Institute, which featured talks on art and heritage politics by Sarah Hollenberg (University of Utah) and Peter Probst (Tufts University). In Spring 2019, I'll be co-teaching the visual studies graduate seminar with Nancy Lutkehaus (USC Anthropology), on cultural heritage, tourism, and art.
In other news, I was interviewed for a recently published article on ethnic minority restaurants in China, by Georgia Freeman, who has a cookbook on Yunnanese food coming out later this fall. As part of the traveling exhibition, Quilts of Southwest China, I have been invited to give a public lecture and to screen my film at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is a very exciting opportunity for me to connect my research on ethnic tourism and social change in rural China with the material culture practices and forms of knowledge transmission embodied in the region's embroidery and textile crafts. The film was also screened at the exhibition's first venue, in Indiana, earlier this year, but this time I'm grateful for the chance to engage directly with museum visitors and audiences.
The public screening and lecture will take place on Sunday, October 8, 2017, and on the following Monday, I'll conduct a seminar on contemporary conditions in ethnic minority China for museum docents. It's really energizing to be able to connect my work with the museum community in Santa Fe, and conversely I look forward to learning a lot about the textiles and objects included in the show. UPDATE 9/28/2017: My film was awarded an honorable mention in the medium-long length film category at the festival. I was very pleasantly surprised by this recognition, especially in the context of a festival devoted to exploring the politics of cultural heritage in the contemporary world.
农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (2013) was selected for screening at the 2017 Heritales: International Heritage Film Festival in Évora, Portugal, which takes place September 21-23. This looks like an exciting festival that is coordinated by scholars at the University of Évora alongside support from UNESCO, and I'm really looking forward to attending the films and discussion. It's been really motivating for me to have folks in the cultural heritage and museum studies worlds interested in my work this year, particularly because the question of "heritage" is one that is opening a lot of necessary, and challenging, conversations about power, domination, and control. I think it's important to tackle these issues from multiple angles, so I'm glad to have this chance to share my work and think about different perspectives at the festival next month. 2017 has started with...a lot of work to do. Luckily, I have a few talks coming up to give me some motivation and focus on thinking through some of my arguments and ideas. Thanks to the department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and the Asia Centre, University of Sussex, I'll be in the UK for a week giving three talks and screening my film -- I am really looking forward to this opportunities to work on and work out some of my current thoughts, and get some much needed input and feedback.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017 University of Sussex Asia Centre Seminar "Media and the Rural Modern: Participatory Video and Documentary as Development in Rural Ethnic China" Tuesday, March 14, 2017 Anthropology of Tourism and Travel Colloquium SOAS, University of London "Archetypes of Ethnicity: Architecture and Expectations in China's Ethnic Tourism" Wednesday, March 15, 2017: Two events SOAS, University of London Department of Anthropology and Sociology Ethnographic Film Series Screening: 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness Anthropology Departmental Seminar "A Yao Self, a Miao Portrait: Two Moments of Filmmaking in 'Minority' China" Details on the exact location and time of the events can be viewed through the links, along with abstracts of my talks to be held at SOAS. More updates and images to come! I recently gave a public talk on my ethnographic film-in-progess as part of the Morphomata Lecture series at the University of Cologne, Germany, where I am a Fellow for the 2016-2017 academic year. As the theme of the fellowship year is "Figures of Image Control," for the past semester we have been discussing questions of biography as representation, portraiture and human experience, and the differences between image-based and text-based modes of depicting, describing, and interpreting human experience. The interdisciplinary group of fellows, coming from fields as diverse as Ancient History, Classics, Archaeology, and Modern German Literature (as well as Anthropology), has motivated me to think more concretely and conceptually about the possibilities of portraiture in ethnographic research and film-making. My lecture addressed some of the methodological and theoretical issues I am working through as I develop my second ethnographic film project, which will be a portrait of two Miao women from Guizhou, China, and is currently titled "These Days, These Homes." An audio-recording of my talk is available online through the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies website. Listen to my public lecture here [scroll down to "Audio Recordings"] 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 In a few weeks, I'm headed to Lund University, Sweden, for a conference on cultural heritage in contemporary China, organized by Marina Svensson at Lund University. I'm contributing a paper on bullfighting in Guizhou (and Yunnan) to this event, and it's a challenge for me to think about this part of my research in the context of cultural heritage discourses as they circulate in and through China today. Clearly bullfighting has become emblematic of certain communities in rural ethnic China, and there is a lot of pride -- and money -- invested in promoting bullfighting as a unique, local practice. How these fights, as planned events and as moments of chaotic pleasure and entertainment for the audiences (as well as income for the organizers and owners), speak to subjective senses of ethnic difference and communitas, as well as to social-structural ambitions for recognition and rewards in China's ethnic tourism industry will be the focus of my presentation. For a few photos of bull-fighting stadiums and other related phenomena, see my post from July 2014 . Participation in and Observations on Community Media Training This past March, I spent three weeks in Guangxi, attending and helping out with a community media training workshop. The program was collaboratively organized by a cultural heritage group based in Kunming that has extensive experience in rural video documentary and participatory media training, and a local Baiku Yao cultural heritage preservation group based in Lihu. It was my first time working directly with students and workshop participants, assisting them with the basics of field interviews and recording, documentary research, and editing on the fly. I was amazed at how dedicated all of the participants were and even more so by the fact that every group managed to complete a 20-30 minute long documentary in just 10 days. This experience also gave me much greater insight into the values and politics of community media, especially when coupled with broader desires (and financial support) for cultural heritage preservation, rural development, and individual ambitions. There is a very active eco-museum, supported by the regional government, in this area too that has helped spur local recognition of the usefulness of digital media in cultural heritage work. These Days, These Homes (work in progress) Recently I've been thinking a lot about the video footage I shot over the past (nearly ten) years, and I've decided it's time to revisit this material and to try to create something new out of this "old" stuff. As I review the footage, I realize that part of what is so important, and interesting, about archival material (even if it's an archive of my own material) is precisely that with the passing of time and the changing of lives, I am seeing and discovering new meanings to this footage. I'm now starting a new film project, currently titled These Days, These Homes, that will draw on existing footage and some new video I plan to shoot over the next year. This film will focus on the stories of two women who have become important interlocutors and friends, and I hope this film will be as much a presentation of research arguments as it is a representation of our personal relationships and my gratefulness to them. I recently discussed this work in progress at the conference, Poetics & Politics: A Documentary Research Symposium at UC Santa Cruz. There, the conversations between a mix of makers and scholars from a range of disciplines pushed me to think about my new film in different directions, both formally and also socially as a means of research engagement and collaboration. |
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