Social Media and Civic Engagement during the Wuhan Lockdown.

 "Tech in Movement” serial talk by Professor Guobin Yang.

Bio: Professor Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society, Interim Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is also on the international advisory board of the Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting Grant Project “To Use or Not to Use? A Relational Approach to ICTs as Repertoire of Contention”.

Abstract

The sealing off of Wuhan from January 23 to April 8, 2020 was an unprecedented historical event in modern world history. Recently published by Columbia University Press, Guobin Yang’s The Wuhan Lockdown recounts this history by presenting the stories of ordinary people through their own voices. This talk introduces the main features of the book and then zooms in on one theme – the use of social media for civic engagement. Questions to be discussed include: What are the main features of civic engagement during the Wuhan lockdown? How did the affordances of social media relate to the forms of engagement? How to understand the effervescence of online civic engagement in early 2020 in the longer history of online activism?

Read more about the talk.