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Communication Seminar Series – Social Media, Personal Aesthetics, and Marginalized Young Creatives in Beijing by Prof. Cara Wallis

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Communication Seminar Series - Social Media, Personal Aesthetics, and Marginalized Young Creatives in Beijing by Prof. Cara Wallis

Date:

27 Oct 2017

Time:

2:30pm-4:00pm

Venue:

Room 313, Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK

Speaker(s):

Prof. Cara Wallis, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Texas A&M University

Enquiries:

manlokchan@cuhk.edu.hk / Tel: 39437701 (Miss Mandy Chan)

Synopsis of Lecture:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explores how a group of marginalized young creatives in Beijing, who are not necessarily part of the established culture industries, pursue their creative endeavors, which they frame in terms of personal aesthetics, and how social media use is intricately connected to these pursuits. Wallis pays particular attention to the way that social media have become a conduit for news modes of desiring in contemporary China (Rofel, 2007) and for the imagination as a form of work and constructing the self (Appadurai, 1990). She will explain how aesthetics is connected to three themes: cultivating knowledge; forms of taste, distinction, and hierarchy; and as an ethical imperative. Wallis believes that understanding these young creatives sheds light on how individual transformations are constitutive of social transformations in China and that social media are a key factor in both processes.