Social Media and Civic Engagement during the Wuhan Lockdown

Talk by Professor Guobin Yang, the University of Pennsylvania, in the Tech in Movement (TiM) serial talks. 

TiM serial talks organise talks and seminars on issues on the frontlines of technology and politics.

Programme

15:30-16:30: Talk by Professor Guobin Yang

16:30-17:00: Q&A

Moderator: Jun Liu, Department of Communication

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?

Speaker bio

Guobin 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 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”. He is the author of the award-winning The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (Columbia University Press, 2016). His new book The Wuhan Lockdown has just been published by Columbia University Press.

The event is free, but please sign up to get the Zoom link.