We are seeking papers to join an organized panel—”Biopolitics, Technologies of Governance, and Media Environments in Modern Chinese and Sinophone Cultures”—to be proposed to the 53rd Annual Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies Conference, which will take place from November 14th to 16th, 2025 at the University of Pittsburgh.
The creation of modern Chinese identity is closely intertwined with the dynamics between biopolitical governance and strategies of resistance. While technologies of control have permeated discourses of modernization since the late 19th century, they have evolved through revolutionary practices during world wars, ideological conflicts across the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War, and involvements with digital platforms in the age of globalization. Amidst these changes, practices of resistance have consistently emerged, shaping the experiences of Chinese modernity by creating narratives and forms of art that manifest individual autonomy through the embodied process of negotiation.
The panel aims to explore how forms of resistance have interacted and negotiated with the national and transnational apparatuses of control and discipline. This panel invites proposals that examine:
- Relationships between individual bodies, technologies of control, and medical humanities;
- Transmedia and multimedia forms of cultural productions that involve negotiation and cooperation;
- Themes related to transnational flows, global networks, and cross-cultural communications;
- War, memories, and the construction of collective and individual agencies;
- Media ecologies and narratives that blur the boundary between the human and the nonhuman.
By examining these topics, this panel seeks to investigate the affective networks constructed within multiple communities and to securitize audiovisual forms of cultural production generated by diverse infrastructures of media technologies.
If interested, please email 250-word abstracts or ideas for your papers to x.hou@wustl.edu and yuc137@pitt.edu and by Friday, June 27th, 2025, even if abstracts are not yet fully formed. We will facilitate further coordination to finalize the materials to be submitted to the conference organizer prior to the final deadline of July 1st, 2025.
Posted by: YuHao Chen <yuc137@pitt.edu>