Spring 2025 Events
Co-organizers: Sangeeta Banerji & Yuerui Wu
Program Associate: Almee Wang & Viv Wu
email: shanghai.hssc@nyu.edu
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Thursday, May 15, 2025
Thursday, May 15, 2025
New as Utility: Media and System Management in Postsocialist China
by Angela Xiao Wu (Associate Professor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU)
by Angela Xiao Wu (Associate Professor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU)
Utilities provide essential services like water, electricity, railroads, and communication. Societies strive to make these services affordable and accessible. In the digital age, as legacy media lose advertising revenue and create “news deserts,” proposals to treat journalism as a public utility have emerged. While liberal capitalist societies approach this idea through fragmented evidence and hypotheticals, China has long treated news as a state-supplied, nonproprietary good, akin to earthquake alerts. Since 1978, amidst shifting social, economic, and technological landscapes, the government’s stubborn commitment to this utility system has led to surprising configurations in public finance, intellectual property, distribution politics, and popular culture.
This book offers an original history, tracing the evolution of China’s administration of the socialist press into its regulation of private digital platforms. Moving beyond directing propaganda and enforcing censorship, I disaggregate the Chinese state into its lesser-studied roles: lawmaker, owner, investor, licensor, thinly stretched administrator, and purported guarantor of collective welfare. The history of the news utility provides a rich site for exploring post-reform Chinese governance, revealing systems management as a cross-domain political rationality. Finally, I propose the utility system as a conceptual framework for understanding our digital age: What does it mean for public culture when it is governed by unified computing regimes?
Angela Xiao Wu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, where she works at the intersection of media and communication studies and science and technology studies (STS). Broadly interested in the politics and the infrastructures of knowledge production, her research spans critical data studies, platform studies, the political economy of media and media governance, and post/socialism studies. Her work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled News as Utility: Media, Platforms, and Systems Management in China.
Monday, April28, 2025
Monday, April28, 2025
“Unruly Forests: Repairing Landscapes or Why Trees Matter”
by Katia Arfara (Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies New York University Abu Dhabi and independent curator)
by Katia Arfara (Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies New York University Abu Dhabi and independent curator)
In Singapore, one of the world’s most densely populated nations in which urban design has shaped the natural world itself, secondary or second-growth forests are part of a colonial shadow forest classification that describes “useless,” and thus inferior, forests. Developed in areas of regeneration after human-caused disturbances, these secondary forests were neither primary tropical forests nor areas used for agricultural cultivation. This talk explores secondary forests as contemporary symbols of resilience and adaptation through the work of the Singapore-based artist Robert Zhao Renhui, founder of the Institute of Critical Zoologists. I focus on Zhao’s ongoing research on the Albizia tree, an invasive species which was brought to Singapore from the Maluku Islands as a shade tree for coffee plantations to become a key species in the city-state’s secondary forests contributing to its biodiversity. Analyzing Zhao’s multidisciplinary research on Albizia, I argue that secondary forests are generators of new ecosystems that challenge binaries such as invasive and native, while reimagining the regulative concept of national landscape.
Katia Arfara is Assistant Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies at NYUAD, and independent curator. Her research, curatorship and teaching focus on migration, ecology, memory and the politics of representation. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright, the DAAD, the Clemens Heller Program, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton, and the Saison Foundation in Tokyo. Her essays have appeared in French, English, Spanish, Arabic and Greek in various critical anthologies and peer-reviewed journals such as Theatre Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Research International, Contemporary Theatre Review and Performance Research. As the Theatre and Dance Artistic Director and Curator of the Onassis Stegi (2009-19), she has initiated and curated numerous interdisciplinary festivals such as the site-specific Fast Forward. She is the author of Théâtralités contemporaines (2012), the editor of “Scènes en transition-Balkans et Grèce” for Théâtre/Public (216), and the co-editor of lntermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere (2018). Dr. Arfara co-leads the Elements pod in the NYUAD “Anthropocene: Urbanism, the Environment, and Sustainability” Research Kitchen and the Liminal Urbanities group in the NYUAD “Al Mashad” Research Kitchen. Her book Curating the Commons. Socially Engaged Public Art is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.
Friday, April 18, 2025
Friday, April 18, 2025
Autonomy, Sensus communis, and Kant’s idea of the Enlightenment
by Xing Nan (Associate Professor, Peking University)
by Xing Nan (Associate Professor, Peking University)
The autonomy of practical reason is a central idea in Kant's moral philosophy. According to Hannah Arendt's reading, however, this idea conflicts with the fundamental fact of the plurality of human beings; at the same time, she suggests that a genuine political philosophy can be derived from Kant's doctrine of sensus communis, as formulated in the Critique of Judgment. While perceptive and illuminating, Arendt's interpretation runs the risk of fragmenting the various parts of Kant's philosophy that are otherwise intimately connected. This talk attempts to assimilate Arendt's insight while offering a more coherent interpretation of Kant's reflections on autonomy and community. It will be argued that Kant's reflections on autonomy and community are both important parts of his idea of Enlightenment, and that the full significance of the latter can only be fully understood in relation to Kant's theory of taste.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Thursday, March 20, 2025
“I create..., you’re just a remix artist: Generative AI in The Last Screenwriter”
My paper analyzes the representation of Generative AI in the 2024 movie, The Last Screenwriter, which was entirely written by ChatGPT and directed by Peter Luisi. I explore how the film stages the artistic teamwork between a human writer and a GenAI tool as a posthuman collaboration which leaves the human writer questioning his abilities as an author. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s theory of the posthuman, I argue that the text destabilizes the anthropocentric subject in favor of non-hierarchical relationships between humans and technological systems. The film envisions screenwriting as a site of hybrid authorship as the protagonist’s collaboration with an AI model challenges traditional notions of solitary genius and individual creativity. Through this posthuman lens, I show how the film gestures towards a future where human and machine co-create meaning in ways that transcend anthropocentric paradigms. The unsettling realization that creativity itself may not be uniquely human questions contemporary definitions of authorship, agency, and authenticity.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Rock, Fossil, Bone: Archaeology as Feminist Practice in Contemporary Spain
Hand-published in a printing of eighty copies in 1985, the writer Clara Janés’ (1940–) small book Fósiles, illustrated by artist Rosa Biadiu (1944–), united twenty-five poems about the shells and fossils Janés picked up by the handful at Madrid’s El Rastro market on Sunday mornings. Not only does the volume’s artisanal production and introduction by Rosa Chacel offer new insight into female writers’ networks and infrastructures of the Spanish Transition, but the work also stands as a key early example of feminist environmental thought in contemporary Spain. Actively proclaiming their presence as archaeological and natural vestiges, Janes’ poetic ‘fossils’ represent an archive, an intimate presence and an act of feminist materiality in the Anthropocene. Drawing on my interviews with Janés and others, through the study of Fósiles I open up to a wider view of how contemporary Spanish female artists and writers have used deep time motifs to shift established notions of historical and scientific time.
Monday, February 24, 2025
Monday, February 24, 2025
Chinese Vernacular Legal Knowledge and Resistance to the Scott Act (1888)
In October 1888, the arrival of the S.S. Belgic in San Francisco brought the enforcement of the Scott Act, which invalidated return certificates and effectively stranded hundreds of Chinese travelers—including merchants and birthright citizens—who had previously been guaranteed reentry. Faced with detention, they mobilized writs of habeas corpus, leveraging the courts to contest their exclusion. While Chae Chan Ping’s Supreme Court case ultimately upheld Congress’s absolute power over immigration, my talk shifts the focus to vernacular legal knowledge, or the strategies Chinese migrants developed through lived experience with exclusion laws. Drawing on admiralty docket books, newspaper reports, and litigation records, I show how Chinese migrants actively shaped legal definitions of “merchant” and “citizen,” often securing greater legal rights than U.S. citizens themselves.
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