Prof. Fan Yang (Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County [UMBC]) will give a talk at 16:30 PM on September 28 (Thursday). The seminar discusses two interconnected human-made nonhuman entities stemming from Shenzhen, China’s first Special Economic Zone, that have become dominant figures in mapping the city’s – and by extension, China’s – future: the robot and the drone. Prof. Yang brings an interdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to the multiple meaning-making practices that engage with these two objects; both participate in enacting the vision for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay as an extension of the success of Shenzhen. These practices simultaneously normalize aspirations for a future fueled by the power of nonhuman technological agents while offering glimpses into the uneven power relations between different humans that underpin such future making. At the same time, they also point to the emergent possibilities of meaning making that conjoin the human and the nonhuman.
 

Speaker 
Prof. Fan Yang (Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County [UMBC])

Dr. Fan Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate in Asian Studies, Global Studies, and the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). Yang has published widely in cultural studies, urban studies, and transnational media studies. Her new book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, is forthcoming in 2024 from the University of Michigan Press.