Day 2: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis

About this workshop:

As the world enters its fourth year living with COVID-19, this workshop critically examines our conceptual tools for capturing this chronic crisis and its seismic impact on global geopolitics and humanistic inquiry. Departing from existing discussions, we focus on how the diverse media practices that flourished during the pandemic are now transforming into historical and aesthetic archives enabling re-readings of overshadowed affects, stories, and relationalities within a larger picture. With a special interest in transregional, diasporic, global, and/or other innovative frameworks of analysis, we seek to address the controversial yet indispensable role of China and Chineseness in constituting the global political ecology of this crisis period. Discussion topics include but are not limited to (post-)pandemic global politics and sociality, crisis temporalities, media forms and platforms, ordinary agency, archive, transregional world-making, soundscapes, ecocriticism, and ongoing changes in Chinese/Sinophone/Asian/Asian American studies.

We invite all interested to join us for this get-together for creative and convivial thinking.

10:00-10:10 Welcome Remarks

10:10-11:50 Panel 1: ARCHIVE

• Fanyi Faye Ma (Duke University): Can Digital Wailing Crumble the Zero-COVID Great Wall?: The Political Lives of Mediated Female Voice
• Nick Admussen (Cornell University): The Postpandemic, the Postsocialist, and Jile Disike (Disco Elysium)
• Lilian Kong (University of Chicago): Calibrating the Self: Approaching East Asian Healing Vlogs as Digital Pandemic Archive
• Shana Ye (University of Toronto): The Pandemic Steel(Still): Materiality, Memory and the Many Lives of Chinese Cargo Containers

1:30-3:10 Panel 2: REWORLDING

• Yanting-Leah Li (Cornell University): From Immunity to Superabundance: Radical Possibilities of Communitarian Ecology
• Shiqi Lin (Cornell University) and Hans Yi Su (Pennsylvania State University): Pandemic Clubbing: Fugitive Cohabitation in a Shifting Global Order
• Christopher T. Fan (University of California, Irvine): Park My Car: Ambiguity and the Auteur in the Films of Chung Mong-hong
• Lily Wong (American University): Transpacific Alliance: Asian/American Coalitional World-Making in and beyond the Pandemic

3:20-4:50 Hybrid Roundtable: RECALIBRATION

A special discussion bringing back scholars who have written about COVID-19 since 2020

• Michael Berry (UCLA), Jenny Chio (University of Southern California), Belinda Kong (Bowdoin College), Carlos Rojas (Duke University), Kaiyang Xu (University of Southern California)
• Moderators: Nick Admussen and Shiqi Lin

5:00-5:30 Concluding Discussion

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Read about Day 1's book talk here.