Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile communication and politics in China
Lecture by: LIU Jun, Ass. Professor, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen. OBS: CHANGED TO ZOOM MEETING
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Aarhus University, via Zoom
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Over the past decades, waves of political contention involving the use of information and communication technologies have swept across the globe. Amid many ICTs that have become an integrated part of communicative practices in protests and social movements, the mobile phone is unquestionably one of the most relevant things that brings the most drastic alteration in contentious politics, given its increasing penetration and nearly universal, all-but-indispensable usage. Especially, the growth in mobile phone subscriptions in China has been exponential over the past three decades since the mobile phone was first made available at the end of the 1980s, and it continues to rise. What may happen to political actions after mobile technologies have become a structured and integral part of everyday life in contemporary China? This talk, based on the newly published monograph Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2020), focuses on what the Chinese find in the mobile communication, what they try to mold it in and make of it in political activism, how they can relate its contentious possibilities to themselves—in short, how we might observe a specific, mobile-enabled culture attempt to make itself at home in the transforming communicative and political environments in contemporary China.
Bio: Jun Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Research Affiliate in the Center on Digital Culture and Society, the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, the U.S.. His research covers political sociology and communication technologies and publishes in the fields of sociology, political science, communication, and computer science like New Media & Society, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Social Movement Studies, and European Journal of Sociology. He has won several awards from American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association. His latest monograph is Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2020).