Visibility & Vulnerability: ESEA Activism and Digital Politics after Covid-19
309 Regent St.
London W1B 2HW
UK
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with with Dr Cindy Ma (University of Leeds) and Dr Diana Yeh (City St George’s, University of London).
Details
The covid-19 pandemic laid bare a series of compounding crises, including underfunded healthcare systems, labour precarity, and global regimes of anti-Blackness. Against this backdrop, Asian diasporic communities faced specific, heightened pressures. Cast as vectors of disease and foreign agents by reactionaries and conservative elites, East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) people became hyper-visible in public space. This period of heightened vulnerability to racial violence spurred a range of responses across diasporic communities. In the UK, community organisers coalesced around the acronym “ESEA” as a way of advancing political demands on behalf of an often-invisibilised group within the country.
In this context we present a dialogue on the mediation of representational politics, drawing on recent and ongoing research projects. Cindy and Diana will present two talks, followed by discussion and Q&A.
Be seen! Negotiating safety and visibility in ESEA diasporic communities since covid-19.
Cindy’s talk will present observations and questions from an early-stage research project on ESEA digital politics in the Western Anglosphere since covid-19, drawing on a collection of online materials (blog posts, websites, instagram profiles) posted by ESEA collectives. In particular, it will highlight recurrent demands of community groups while identifying areas of tension within this heterogeneous coalition: What does safety mean? Who is visibility for? And what is the political value in “being seen”?
Collective Histories in the Making?: Unsettled Solidarities in Emerging ‘East and Southeast Asian’ Activisms in Britain
Diana Yeh discusses unfolding responses to the rise in anti-Asian racial violence since the outbreak of COVID-19, the political claims and connections made and unmade, and the challenges to mobilising around a politics of identity. She highlights the institutionalisation of the term ESEA and the deepening of fissures within community, drawing attention to how forms of racial governance shape and constrain the work of activists.
Biographies
Dr Cindy Ma is a Lecturer in Race and Media at the University of Leeds’ School of Media and Communication, as well as a faculty affiliate at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Her research examines how sociotechnical systems, political discourse, and racial inequity intersect. She employs qualitative and critical methods to advance conversations taking place within the fields of political communication, critical race and digital studies, and cultural studies. She received a PhD in 2023 from the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute.
Dr Diana Yeh is a Reader in the Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries at City St George’s, University of London. She works on race and racisms, migration, cultural politics and activism, with a particular focus on East and Southeast Asian communities, and her current research explores community and creative responses to anti-Asian racial violence and racial inequalities in the creative and cultural industries. As Principal Investigator of the project, ‘Responding to COVID-19 Anti-Asian Racial Violence through Community Care, Solidarity and Resistance’, she founded the ESEA Online Community Hub (https://www.eseahub.co.uk), which seeks to empower individual and community capacity to respond to racial violence by holding space – and acting as a hub – for networks of community creativity, care, resistance and solidarity. Her books include The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014) and Contesting British Chinese Culture (2018).
* Image credit: Zhang Yanzi, Mask Diary (2020)
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