Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with with Prof. Deqiang Ji (Communication University of China). The seminar will be held in The Pavilion (Room C1.18), in the New Cavendish Street building.
Details
Since 2014, a top-down national strategy has been implemented across the four-layered media system in China, which is crystallized as Media Convergence (Meiti Ronghe). This is widely considered as an active response to the enormous challenges caused by the rising dominance of digital platforms and the formation of a platformized society. In 2020, the government required the media system to deepen convergence with the internet to build the undetachable connection with the public. After ten years of “self-revolution”, media organizations in China have built cutting-edge digital infrastructure, mobile applications, and interfaces with diverse digital platforms. However, the competition for public attention and usage between media organizations and monopolistic commercial platforms is still going on, meanwhile redefining and rethinking the roles of (mainstream) media in a converged digital communication environment becomes critically important.
This talk will provide a preliminary framework to interpret the complex process of media convergence in China: politically consolidating authority of traditional media and supporting e-governance, economically integrating into a fast growing digital economy, as well as societally providing public services and building links with grassroots communities. Arguably, the overall goal of media convergence in China in the past ten years is to re-connect to the public in a platformized society.
Biographies
Prof. Deqiang Ji is Professor of International Communication, Vice Dean of the MOE Joint Institute of International Communication Research, Research Fellow of the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China. His research covers several interrelated fields including media and digitization, political economy of communication, and international communication. Recently, his research centers on the platformization of Chinese society driven by the complex power formation by internet giants, state agencies, and the public. He is the author of two monographs, namely Digitizing China: The Political Economy of China’s Digital Switchover (2019) and Imagining International Communication beyond Borders (2024). He also edited five books and published many academic papers in international journals such as International Communication Gazette, Chinese Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Javnost-the Public, Global Media and China, etc. He was the Vice Chair of the International Communication Section of International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) between 2016 and 2024. He is the Incoming Associate Editor of Communication Monographs, Managing Editor of Journal of Transcultural Communication, Commissioning Editor of Global Media and China.
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)
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi, exploring “the many faces of history” in news reporting around the war on Gaza.
Details
Drawing on media content from Western, Israeli, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian sources, this talk investigates the place of history, or the lack thereof, in the mediation of the war on Gaza. It analyses how mainstream Western media are implicated in covering up genocide by unpacking the deployment of history in news narratives. It differentiates between history that is produced in the present for the future, and the erasure of history as the evidence-based narrative of what happened in the past. It draws attention to the projection of power through media in shaping history as a future-oriented emotion and discursive trope. It then turns attention to the visualisation of history amid saturation in images and videos of the Hamas October 7 attack to those taken and disseminated by Israeli soldiers, to digital art and AI.
Biography
Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. He works on the geopolitics of global communications, particularly in relation to news media and popular culture. He is interested in the politics that shape the ways we talk about and use communications technologies, as well as the role of media in forging our imaginaries of the past and the future. In his research, he draws on his expertise on Arabic media and on the Middle East and North Africa region. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in communications, journalism and cultural studies journals including Communication Theory, Journalism, and the International Journal of Communication. He is currently completing a book on the politics of history in Arab media. Al-Ghazzi is an editor in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Jonathan Paylor and Dr Rebecca Bramall (University of the Arts London), exploring crowdfunding’s possibilities and implications.
Details
Platform companies, policymakers and commentators claim that crowdfunding empowers citizens and makes finance more accessible and egalitarian. Critical scholars of crowdfunding such as Kenworthy (2024) cast doubt over such claims of democratisation, arguing that this platformized mode of voluntary transfer legitimates welfare state entrenchment, undermines tax-funded public services, entrenches inequalities and ultimately serves to maintain the neoliberal order. Such critical work offers a valuable corrective to celebratory accounts of crowdfunding, yet it tends to conceptualize crowdfunding and taxation as essentially rivalrous social mechanisms, overlooking the ‘heterogeneity and diversity of the economic modalities’ (Langley and Leyshon 2017) at play in fundraising settings. Drawing on an affordance analysis of the digital platform Open Collective and ethnographic fieldwork with a London-based mutual aid group, this presentation seeks to bring into focus practices that both trouble critical accounts of crowdfunding and its imbrication in the neoliberalisation of the state, and point to the limitations of existing ways of organising and financing collective welfare projects.
Biographies
Dr Rebecca Bramall is Reader in Cultural Politics at University of the Arts London, where she teaches and researches in the field of media, communications and cultural studies. Rebecca’s research focuses on the communicative dimensions of taxation, exploring the cultural frameworks that enable people to make sense of tax, public spending, and their taxpaying identities. From 2022-25, Rebecca is Project Leader and Principal Investigator for Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (ReDigIm), a research and knowledge exchange project investigating meanings and practices of redistribution in Europe. Rebecca is also deputy editor of the journal New Formations and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Economy.
Dr Jonathan Paylor is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of the Arts London. Jonathan’s background spans the fields of cultural studies and policy studies, and his research interests are centred around the intersection of media and collective life. He is working with Dr Rebecca Bramall on Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (ReDigIm).