Title: The Nurturing of ‘Public-Persons’: As a Part of Community Organization in the Urban Renewal of Hong Kong

Speaker: Gloria CHAUNG Wing Yee, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Zoom Meeting: ID 765-199-345
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/765199345

Date: 27 March 2020

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

In this talk Gloria Chaung will be sharing ideas from a chapter of my thesis, “Public-Persons: Media as the Nurturing of Persons”. Media production can be a process of nurturing “public-persons”, people engaged in public life in certain ways. Media production is a form of communication, in which there needs to be a message-sender, a message-recipient, and the message. The media practices of the urban renewal concern group she studied, an old district autonomy advancement group, tried to curate a public space, in which they engaged the local residents in producing expression. Reflecting and building on the scholastic discussion of the “public sphere”, she argues that these repeated, small-scale and careful media practices of expression in public were aimed to nurture “public-persons” who were capable of borrowing power from “the public” as well as resisting attacks from it. The nurturing of “public-persons” is a unique part of the group’s activism regarding urban renewal and gentrification in Hong Kong.