Affect, Ethics, and Social Media in Contemporary China

Speaker: Prof. Cara Wallis

Bio:  Cara Wallis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones (NYU Press, 2013) and multiple articles and book chapters on gender and digital media in China. Her current book manuscript, Social Media and Ordinary Life: Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China (NYU Press) is scheduled to be published in spring 2025.

Discussant: Prof. Dongjing Kang

Bio: Dongjing Kang is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Ohio University and an M.A. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is currently serving as the chair of the U.S.-based Association for Chinese Communication Studies. Before joining SJTU, she taught at Florida Gulf Coast University, University of Colorado Denver, and Ohio University. Her research intersects Intercultural/International Communication, Organizational Communication, and Development Communication.

Abstract

In Xi Jinping’s New Era of China, the party-state goes to great lengths to summon the populace into the Chinese Dream through encouraging “positive energy,” creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism and through engaging in coercive measures. How do those who are socially, economically, and/or politically disenfranchised make their way in this evolving milieu? To answer this question, in this talk Cara Wallis discusses her current book project in which she examines the daily practices, ethical choices, desires, and emotions that are constitutive of the communicative processes involved in intimate, daily struggles for voice and a better life among four diverse marginalized groups – young creatives from rural areas, rural micro-entrepreneurs, domestic workers, and young feminist activists. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across geographic locales, Wallis foregrounds the entanglement of affect, emotion, ordinary ethical decisions and judgments, and digital technology. She focuses in particular on how social media is used for self-expression, self-representation, fights for equality, the maintenance of community, and economic livelihood. In the midst of daunting forces – big data, artificial intelligence, massive surveillance – Wallis centers the “small,” showing how structural inequality, the urban/rural divide, patriarchal gender norms, generational differences, and varying levels of social, cultural, and economic capital can lead to contradictory or ambivalent outcomes of technology use.