East Asia Program Lecture Series presents “Walls-as-Media: Between Cheng (Wall-City) and Ping (Wall-Screen)"

Speaker: Jinying Li, Assistant Professor, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Description:

As global networks promise boundless access, we are facing increasing layers of walls. From computer firewalls to China’s Great Firewall, from the Facebook wall to the virtual walls in virtual reality, digital media, in fact, are largely walled. The existence of these walls shatters the myth of what Manuel Castells has famously called “the space of flows,” and highlights the significant functions of walled enclosure in managing, controlling, and mediating information, knowledge, and experience. It problematizes the enlightenment ideals of transparency, depth, openness, and universal knowledge, and underlines walled mediation as the fundamental condition of modern experience. My talk proposes a theoretical framework to explore the meanings and functions of the wall in media history by studying its archeological formation as a media device as well as its genealogical development as a discursive metaphor. I first examine the media archeology of the wall as a material artifact, focusing on cheng 城 (wall-city) and ping 屏 (wall-screen) as two archetypal walls in Chinese media history. In their various renditions and configurations, both cheng and ping define the wall as an asymmetrical and contradictory structure, which is simultaneously a blocking barrier that encloses a territory and community as well as a displaying surface that expresses feelings and powers. This duality between a barrier and a surface further informs the genealogy of wall as a discursive formation, which I examine by comparing the development of the wall as a structure metaphor with that of the window metaphor in the competing conceptions of screen as a media system. I argue that the wall presents an alternative genealogy from the window, shifting from optical apparatus to spatial devices. This conceptual shift from the window to the wall, from optical projection to spatial construction, is also a move away from the perspective-centric conceptualization of modern media, pointing toward surface-oriented media configurations of environmental management, mobility control and socio-political demarcation.

Speaker Bio: Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. Her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), explores the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom. She is currently competing her second book project, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. Jinying is also a filmmaker and has worked on animations, feature films, and documentaries. Two documentary TV series that she produced were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayu Haitang, 2016). She also produced an experimental VR documentary 47km (2017) in collaboration with Chinese director Zhang Mengqi at Beijing Film Academy.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

JOHN W. NIXON ‘53 DISTINGUISHED POLICY FELLOWS PROGRAM

Marielena Hincapié, Esq.
Distinguished Immigration Fellow and Visiting Scholar
Cornell Immigration Law and Policy Program

Marielena Hincapié is a nationally respected leader, legal and political strategist, and a leading voice in the national immigration conversation. She was key in supporting youth leaders in creating and successfully implementing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She cofounded the Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) coalition to address children and families' access to safety net programs. She is writing a forthcoming book Becoming America: A Personal History of A Nation’s Immigration Wars (Flatiron Books).

Today's society faces challenges of great complexity. Some of these problems are the result of modern society's past successes (such as climate change, the aging of the population, the impact of robotization on the workforce, or disinformation), and that is why they have proven so difficult to solve. The policy approaches, concepts, and instruments have also exhausted their capacity to manage a rapidly evolving society that does not match the social context for which they were designed. Finally, our Enlightenment knowledge systems, driven by the forces of specialization, are also incapable of addressing these problems, since they were one of the main causes of the progress that has now become paradoxical.

To address current social challenges, it is necessary to integrate disciplines and experiment with new scientific approaches and methods, rather than rely on fragmented systems that created the problems in the first place.

This workshop will focus on a nascent attempt in Spain, linked to Cornell's Clinic Lab program, to use artificial intelligence for two purposes: for rigorous social research through interdisciplinary teams, and to address xenophobia, a social ill that has been growing rapidly in online settings.

Sergio García Magariño has a Ph.D. in Sociology with international recognition and is a specialist in education and social development. He is currently a lecturer (associate professor) at the Public University of Navarra and a researcher at its Institute for Advanced Social Research: I-Communitas. He is co-founder and director of the Institute for Global Knowledge, Governance and Development and associate researcher at the think tank Globernance, directed by Daniel Innerarity. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex, at Cornell University, Visiting Professor at the University College of Dublin, and Consulting Professor at Nur University in Bolivia. His research interests include processes of violent radicalization, mechanisms of collaborative governance, collective security, social and economic development, and issues related to the sociology of science and religion. These are reflected in some 85 academic articles and books. He is a regular contributor to written and audiovisual media. He was included in the catalogue of Thinking Heads 2020-2021, a communications consultancy, as one of the 100 new talented speakers in Spain. A sample of his production can be seen at sergarcia.es or at his website at the Public University of Navarra.

ECUADORCome visit a collaborative poster session featuring visiting students fromEcuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ)! Students fromCornell and USFQ will present their collaborative research on comparativeeducation policy related to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal(SDG) 4: Quality Education. Together, they’ve examined two of the sevenoutcome targets: elimination of all discrimination in education, andeducation for sustainable development and global citizenship in thecontext of the United States and Ecuador. Stop by anytime 3-4:30 pm to see what they’ve discovered! Email Dr. Julie Ficarra (jmf389@cornell.edu)with questions or to request accommodations.