Contemporary Chinese Culture Lecture: “Airing Grievances & the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reforms” with Dr. Julie Chu (Tuesday, Nov 8, 2022)

Please join the Boston University Anthropology Department for its first Contemporary Chinese Culture Lecture:

“Airing Grievances & the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reforms” 

Dr. Julie Chu (Univ. of Chicago)

Tuesday, November 8, 2022 at 3:30 pm

in CAS 132, 725 Commonwealth Ave, Boston MA 02215

Please RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/contemporary-chinese-culture-lecture-tickets-444736116697

This talk considers the ways in which legal reform unfolds as a palpable, if vague, “change in the air” in new zones of urban revitalization and port development in contemporary China. Drawing from various examples of citizen-state struggles over the spread of bad air(s) throughout the rezoned areas of coastal Fuzhou (e.g. the free trade port zone, the touristic city center), I show how redevelopment as filtered through “the law” can operate as a distinctive infrastructural project of climate control to shape the atmospherics of civilian protest; this includes gathering unlikely allies together under a shared cloud of political disaffection and procedural noise to ponder the revolutionary and everyday possibilities of social change in China beyond the current governing logics of “reform.”

About the Speaker:

Julie Y. Chu, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences in the College at the University of Chicago, is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers traversing the Taiwan Strait, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific (via ports and border zones spanning the PRC and the U.S.), this work examines how certain figures of “infrastructure” animate the global politics of time in three distinct keys — as matters of constancy, rhythm and non/event.

A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video and other multimedia projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing two new ethnographic foci:

(1) on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of renao (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or, literally, “heat and noise”)

(2) on the politics and poetics of logistics, especially in relation to e-commerce driven innovations in moving goods, people and information according to increasing aspirations for on-demand, seamless “fulfillment.” This includes launching the collaborative research project, “Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds,” the cross-platform online discussion of #Logistics in the Time of Covid, and the Spring 2022 issue of Roadsides on #Logistics

[bio from https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/julie-chu]