How to Move the Masses on Chinese Social Media: A Narrative-Platform Approach
In earlier revolutionary mobilization, passions were fired up through ‘emotion work’ (Perry 2002). Emotions may be both embodied and mediated. On social media, however, they are all mediated. Yet digital mediation produces emotional intensities in its own way. In this talk, Professor Guobin Yang explores several cases of emotional mobilization on Chinese social media to understand how they are narrated and performed through platform affordances.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Wuhan Lockdown (2022), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009). His current work focuses on social media, narratives, and emotions in everyday activism, digital culture, and pandemic storytelling.
Yang has edited or co-edited seven books, including Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis (with Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan, 2024), Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production (with Wei Wang, 2021), Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Victor Pickard, 2017), The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (with Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, 2016), China’s Contested Internet (NIAS Press, 2015), and Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (with Ching-Kwan Lee, 2007).
An elected Fellow of the International Communication Association, Professor Yang serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Forum, Social Media + Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Global Media and China, Chinese Journal of Sociology, China Information.
Date:
26 May 2025, 17:00
Venue:
Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details:
Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre (lower ground floor)
Speaker:
Professor Guobin Yang (University of Pennsylvania)
Organising department:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organisers:
Dr Bo-jiun Jing (University of Oxford),
Dr Evelyn Chan (University of Oxford),
Professor Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford),
Professor Denise van der Kamp (University of Oxford),
Professor Henrietta Harrison (University of Oxford),
Dr Chigusa Yamaura (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Denise van de Kamp (University of Oxford)
Part of:
China Studies Seminar series
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Orchard
