[Air-L] cfp - Digital Chinese Diaspora - Panel for CSAA 2017, Wellington NZ

[Haiqing Yu]

CFP—Panel on “Social/Digital Media and New Formations of Chinese Diaspora”

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) 2017 conference<http://csaa.asn.au/about/csaa-annual-conference/csaa-annual-conference-2017/> (6-8 December 2017, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand)


Panel convened by:

Haiqing Yu (Associate Professor of Chinese media and culture, University of New South Wales Australia), h.yu at unsw.edu.au<mailto:h.yu at unsw.edu.au>
Wanning Sun (Professor of Chinese media and communication, University of Technology Sydney, Australia), wanning.sun at uts.edu.au<mailto:wanning.sun at uts.edu.au>


This panel aims to bring together original research papers from a diversified range of disciplines in arts, humanities, and social sciences to examine the role of digital and social media platforms and practices in forging news ways of civic engagement among the highly diversified and stratified Chinese diaspora around the world. Key issues to be discussed include:


  *   What are the newly emerging digital and mobile communication practices among Chinese diasporas and how do they impact on their social and political life in their host countries;
  *   To what extent do these digital practices create new forms of civic engagement and enable Chinese migrant communities to participate in public life in their host city/country;
  *   What are political, social and economic impacts of their flexible place-making practices via digital and mobile platforms among the Chinese diaspora (such as the widespread use of WeChat) on their host countries and societies—both opportunities and challenges?

Existing scholarship on Chinese diaspora and diaspora media has focused on how the Chinese diaspora use various media and communication platforms and networks to maintain connections to the “Motherland” and to reconstitute the home abroad. Recent work has traced new developments in diaspora Chinese media, updated the current landscape of diasporic Chinese media and communication (particularly with the proliferation of digital platforms and new modes of communication), and documented the impact of China’s soft power initiatives and “going global” policy. It has also pointed to a new, and seemingly intractable, tension: the emergence of stronger links between new migrants in the diaspora and China in on the one hand, and a continuous desire for a global, postmodern and hybrid Chinese diasporic identity, on the other. This tension is played out in the process of media production, circulation, and consumption, and it manifests itself most acutely through individual digital media practices in the cyberspace and on mobile devices.

This panel takes a critical look at Chinese digital diaspora’s embodied and emplaced media and cultural practices mediated via social/digital media, as they negotiate their transcultural, transnational and yet geo-local identity, networks, relationships, and politics. We call for papers that will examine everyday patterns and strategies, sacrifices, and ingenuity of Chinese digital diaspora of various human variables (age, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, race, disability, and linguistics), as they live out the cosmopolitan identity and lifestyle through both online and offline encounters with real people. We encourage critical analyses of social inclusion/exclusion and power relations embedded in place-making practices of Chinese digital diaspora and how such digitally mediated place-making practices impact on their citizenship accumulation and sociopolitical life in their host countries and communities. It is our hope that papers in this panel will update our understanding of the Chinese digital diaspora in the era of China’s rise, contribute to the theorization on flexible and digital citizenship, and above all, draw out real and potential implications of these insights on Australian, New Zealand and other host countries’ public life, especially in regard to the national aims of strengthening democracy, building cohesion in a multicultural society, and developing cultural, trade and economic relations with China.


Please submit your proposed title, abstract (200 words), and a brief bio (50 words) to A/Prof. Haiqing Yu h.yu at unsw.edu.au<mailto:h.yu at unsw.edu.au> by 15 July 2017. Please put “Paper proposal for CSAA panel on digital Chinese diaspora” in the subject line. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by the end of July.