Discussing urban planning and design, cinema and TV practices, micro-electronics labour, and technological infrastructures in Beijing, Josh Nevves will make some ‘critical inquiries with the digital about the digital’ as part our research seminars series. Join us and the reception afterwards. (Please register.)
Beijing’s Digital Urbanism: Media technologies and Urban Transformation
Joshua Neves is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at Concordia University (Montréal)
Date: Tuesday, 17 March 2020
Time: 5-7pm followed by reception
Host: King’s College London, Department of Digital Humanities
Location: Strand Campus London WC2R 2LS, room: Macadam Building MB-1.1.4
Please register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/beijings-digital-urbanism-media-technologies-and-urban-transformations-tickets-95258736445
This talk draws on Joshua Neves’ 2020 book Underglobalization (Duke UP), which examines the cultural politics of the fake as a key site through which contemporary forms of underdevelopment are governed, mediated, and contested—in China and globally.
The talk will explore how tensions between (il)legality and (il)legitimacy shore up dominant models for development and, paradoxically, drive dismissals of Chinese modernization as counterfeit or excessive. Combining site-specific research in Beijing with a set of theoretical problems tied to Asian globalizations, it explore the mundane intersections of media technologies and urban transformation.
The analysis centers on urban planning and design, cinema and TV practices, micro-electronics labor, and technological infrastructures. Moving away from routine discourses about copyright violations and the creative industries, the book turns its attention to the proliferation of illegal cities, citizens, and futures. In particular, it explores how piracy and fakes are manifestations of “underglobalization”—the ways social actors undermine and refuse to implement the specific procedures and protocols required by globalization at different scales.
Arguing for a shift from global civil society to global political society, Neves considers how mundane and mediated practices of faking—from informal networks to piratical citizenship—undergird globalization as we know it. Download the Introduction to the book here<https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0805-7_601.pdf>.
Bio:
Joshua Neves is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at Concordia University (Montréal), where he directs the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab and teaches in the Film and Moving Image Studies program. He is the author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy, and co-editor of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global. His current examines how global smart technologies shape new cultures of optimization that reimagine human capacities and unequally distribute augmentation across the world system.
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