Event

Penn Sociology's Guobin Yang is directing this workshop presented by the Social Science Research Council and co-sponsored by Sociology and the PARGC of the Annenberg School for Communication.

Symbolic Dimensions of Mediated Activism in Inter-Asia is one of many workshop discussions organized as part of the SSRC's Transregional Virtual Research Institute (TVRI) on "Media, Activism, and the New Political in InterAsia." Directed by Guobin Yang, this daylong workshop will explore, through comparative and historical discussions, the empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues in the analysis of the production, circulation, and impact of icons and symbols of protest and opposition in inter-Asia (China, India, and MENA). Our goal is to understand the discursive and symbolic connections and interactions of mediated activism in inter-Asia. In popular imagination, incidents of dissent and popular protest are often remembered for some critical moments with great symbolic value – the storming of the Bastille, the tank man in Tiananmen Square, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran. How are they preserved, passed down and absorbed into the repertoires of contention? How are new political symbols created and disseminated? What is the role of social media? Under what conditions do local and national political symbols become trans-local and trans-national? How do global media spectacles impinge on regional and local mobilization? These are some of the questions we will explore in this conference.

Speakers include:

Payal Arora (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Radha Hegde (NYU)
Annemarie Iddins (University of Michigan)
Min Jiang (UNC-Charlotte)
Joe Khalil (Northwestern University in Qatar)
Marwan Kraidy (University of Pennsylvania)
Wazhmah Osman (Temple University)
Aswin Punathambekar (University of Michigan)
Steven Schrag (University of Pennsylvania)
Guobin Yang (University of Pennsylvania)
Elaine Yuan (UI-Chicago)

Please email rsvp@asc.upenn.edu to RSVP.