The Ohio State University Center for Historical Research, Department of History, OSU Global Arts and Humanities Theme, East Asian Studies Center, and the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Center present:
Media & Materiality: Category Crisis and Transitional Moments in East Asia and Eastern Europe
Symposium Abstract: The language of “crisis” is pervasive in our neoliberal pandemic world, but the term is so capacious as to demand more rigorous scrutiny to become critically useful. The goal of our symposium is to theorize what crisis means at the level of lived experience, in the media and in the materialties that create historical subjectivities and relationalities. In other words, what happens when the mediated environments that we are enmeshed in are suddenly forced to function differently? When categories understood as structures (of feeling) and (medium) specificities come into question? Furthermore, if media and materialities mediate our experience, how do we account for media’s own crises at moments of historical shock? For example, what can we learn if we consider that the inflection point between socialism and postsocialism is also a moment in which film loses ground to video and data? How do we read a doubly critical crisis when the very thing that anchors us in specific historical life worlds changes at the same moment in which social structures shift? We are eager to untangle these interrelated meanings of crisis by turning to East Asia and Eastern Europe, two locales in which much of the 20th century was experienced as crisis and shock and whose careful study can help us develop historical methods and theoretical tools necessary to understand an age of crisis.
Full abstracts of all talks are available on the Center for Historical Research main event page.
Schedule:
3/3/22: Keynote and Introductions
5:00 PM Introductions and preliminary comments
5:30 PM Keynote Speech
- Suk-Young Kim, UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television
- “Crisis Over Free Choice: Reading Squid Game Comparatively as a Millennial Parable”
3/4/22: Panel Presentations
9:00-9:30 Virtual breakfast chit chat
9:30-11:00 Panel 1: Hardware, Software, and the Limits of Convenience
- Jianqing Chen, Washington University in St. Louis
- “Building the ‘Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal’ Fiber-Optic Core Network in Historical Upheavals”
- Diane Wei Lewis, Washington University in St. Louis
- “Women and the Software Crisis in Japan”
- Joshua Neves, research done in collaboration with Marc Steinberg, Concordia University
- “In-Convenience”
12:00-1:00 Lunch break
1:00-2:30 Panel 2: Crisis Structures
- Victoria Lupascu, University of Montreal
- “Where Can Patients Go When the Hospital Is Closed? Multilayered Crisis in the Romanian Medical System”
- Damian Mandzunowski, University of Freiburg
- “Reading Through What Crises? Collective Reading Activities in a Changing Socialist China”
- Edward Tyerman, University of California, Berkeley
- “The Eternal Crisis of the Peripheral Empire: Vladimir Sorokin’s World System”
2:30-3:00 Coffee/tea break
3:00-4:00 Panel 3A: The Postsocialist Potentialities of Victor and Valter
- Dragan Batancev, Concordia University
- “Cinema as a Catalyst of Chinese Soft Power in the Postsocialist Balkans”
- Steven Lee, University of California, Berkeley
- “Deterritorialized Nationality: Viktor Tsoi Saves the World”
4:00-5:00 Panel 3B: Across the Great Divides
- Nicolai Volland, The Pennsylvania State University
- “What’s in (an) Epoch? Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism in China Across the 1949 Divide”
- Travis Workman, University of Minnesota
- “From Imperial to Postcolonial Cinema in Early Cold War Korea”
6:00 Concluding remarks
3/5/22 Archives, Methods, Materials
9:00-9:30 Virtual breakfast chit chat
9:30-11:00 Panel 4: Of Books and Dusty Digits
- Xiaoyu Xia, University of California, Berkeley
- “Alternative Technologies of Tagging and Tracking: Liang Qichao, Genre Fiction, and the Transformation of Literary Taxonomy in Late Qing China”
- Lara Yang, University of Freiburg
- “Dust Hunters in the Confucius.com Era: How the Internet Changed the Identity Ecology of Second-hand Book Culture in China”
- Julia Keblinska, The Ohio State University
- “(Un)Bricking the Apocalypse: Towards a Second Run Archive”
11:00-12:30 Methods and Materials Roundtable with Invited Guests
12:30-1:00 Virtual lunch and concluding remarks
