Month: November 2024

Digital Soundscapes of In-Betweenness: Crisis Documentation Through Global Chinese Podcasting

Friday, November 8th, 3:00–5:00 PM

Presenter: Shiqi Lin (Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Discussant: Lilian Kong (PhD Student, EALC/CMS, University of Chicago)

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Access Shiqi’s paper HERE with password Podcast

Abstract: This chapter thinks through global Chinese podcasting—a digital audio culture that has grown exponentially since COVID-19—to consider what it means for sound to document a permanent state of crisis and pave alternative futures for global media justice. As COVID-19 continued to unfold and restructure macro and micro levels of global social life, I contend that podcasting stood out for its capacity of “elastic listening,” which allowed for both a condition of close, intimate listening and a state of distracted, anxious listening for a sense of security and refuge. The modest, conversational, episodic, and border-crossing qualities of this hybrid medium, I discuss, enabled podcasting to capture shifting traces of this chronic crisis with a sonic infrastructure of everyday documentation. For this workshop, specifically, I highlight how my working concept, “in-betweenness,” may capture the medium specificity of podcasting for straddling multiple modes of media, transmitting intimacy, and linking together diasporic/global Chinese populations on the air. In a context of growing media fragmentation and political polarization across the world, I conceptualize podcasting as a mode of guerrilla media that continues to shift its form across media platforms, intersect with other forms of storytelling, and carry the weight of social engagement for alternative futures in the making.

Presenter: Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests include Chinese film and media cultures, critical theory, media theory, and global cultural politics. Her current book project examines the rise and shift of different documentary media in the Chinese digital media landscapes in response to post-2008 global social crises. With Xiaobo Yuan, she is the co-editor of a special issue, “Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China,” for China Perspectives (2023). Her other works have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as positions politics, Foundry, and Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media.

Discussant: Lilian Kong is a PhD Student in Cinema & Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

★This event is also co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Centers program. The event’s content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government ★