… the following former holders of its doctoral studentships for their recent successes:

Dr Nicholas Horsburgh, for her appointment to a Lectureship at the University of Sheffield;

Dr Isabella Jackson, who is moving to take up a Lectureship at Trinity College Dublin;

Dr Andrew Wormald, for securing a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation award to support his post-doctoral research at the University of Groningen;

and Dr Holly Snape, for success in her PhD viva at the University of Bristol.

And we congratulate, too, Dr Yangwen Zheng, BICC Director, for her elevation to a personal chair at the University of Manchester.

THE IMPACT OF AUM’S VIOLENCE IN JAPAN AND BEYOND

5:30-7:00 pm , March 18 ^th,

2015, John Casken Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, The University of Manchester.

March 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the Aum Affair, when members of the religious group Aum Shinrikyō released sarin poison gas in Tokyo. The affair had huge repercussions in legal, social, political and cultural terms in Japan and beyond as authorities sought to balance the liberal democratic freedoms with demands for heightened control of potentially “dangerous” groups.

This round-table brings together leading experts on the Aum Affair to discuss the incident and its aftermath, examining such topics as how to strike a balance between religious and political freedom and social safety; what are appropriate legal and social responses to terrorism; how best to commemorate and remember acts of violence; and what wider lessons can be learned from the Japanese experience.

This roundtable takes place as a collaboration and with funding support from the BICC and the White Rose East Asia Centre.

Participants

Tatsuya Mori (Documentary filmmaker, TV director and author),

Mark Mullins (Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Auckland),

Mark Pendleton (Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield),

Ian Reader (Professor of Religious Studies, Lancaster University)

Erica Baffelli (Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of Manchester).

When China Rules the World- A talk by Martin Jacques

Manchester University Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre, School of Arts Languages and Cultures, 23rd February 2015, 12-1pm

First published in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim – and controversy – When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of a New Global Order has sold a quarter of a million copies, been translated into eleven languages, nominated for two major literary awards, and is the subject of an immensely popular TED talk. He has been invited thanks to BICC funding and will host a talk at Manchester University on the 23rd March, where he will meet current students studying Chinese Studies and History at undergraduate and postgraduate level and members of the public.

Since the first publication of When China Rules the World, the landscape of world power has shifted dramatically. In the three years since the first edition was published, When China Rules the World has proved itself to be a remarkably prescient book, and transformed the nature of the debate on China.

Now, in this greatly expanded and fully updated new edition, with nearly three-hundred pages of new material, backed up by the latest statistical data, Martin Jacques renews his assault on conventional thinking about China’s ascendancy

Martin Jacques is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. It was first published in 2009 and has since been translated into fourteen languages and sold over 350,000 copies. The book has been shortlisted for two major literary awards. A second edition of the book, greatly expanded and fully updated, was published in 2012. His TED talk on how to understand China has had over 1.8 million views. He is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC.

He has previously been a Visiting Professor at Renmin University, the International Centre for Chinese Studies, Aichi University, Nagoya, and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He was until recently a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at IDEAS, a centre for diplomacy and grand strategy, and a fellow at the Asia Research Centre, both at the London School of Economics. He was formerly the editor of the renowned London-based monthly Marxism Today until its closure in 1991 and was co-founder of the think-tank Demos. He has been a columnist for many newspapers, made many television programmes and is a former deputy editor of The Independent newspaper. He took his doctorate while at King’s College, Cambridge.

He has been invited to give lectures at many of the world’s top universities including Harvard, Cornell, UCLA, USC, Cambridge, Oxford, Peking, Tsinghua, Renmin, NUS, Tokyo, University of Hong Kong, amongst many others. He has given talks to many corporate clients including Bank of America, BlackRock, Pictet, Shell, Allianz, BNP Paribas, Financial Times, British Telecom, BBC, HR50, Amerada Hess, Investec, DSM and Khazanah.

He is chair of the Harinder Veriah Trust, which supports girls from deprived backgrounds with their education at Assunta Primary School and Assunta Secondary School, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, where his wife, the late Harinder Veriah, was educated. It has also sponsored young Malaysian lawyers from under-privileged backgrounds to work for two-year stints at Hogan Lovells in London.

Tickets for the public can be obtained at https://eventbrite.com/event/15740814199/

 Citizen Media in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, 

China and East Asia, and the Arab World
An interdisciplinary doctoral/postdoctoral training workshop

27-28 January 2014, The University of Manchester

Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: 22 November 2013 

Call for Contributions from Doctoral Students and Early Career Researchers

The term ‘citizen media’, or ‘participatory media’, covers a wide range of activities undertaken by ordinary, non-professional citizens who lay a claim to an area of public life and politics and seek to transform it in some way. From videos circulated on Youtube to graffiti, street performance and other forms of street art, and from community radio to blogging, crowd sourcing, tweeting, flashmob protest and hacktivism, new forms of civic engagement continue to develop, expand and shape the relationship between the private and the public, the local and the global, mainstream and alternative media, corporations and clients, the state and civil society. The aim of the workshop is to bring together doctoral students and early career researchers who work on citizen media in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, China and East Asia, and the Arab world – areas where citizen media has been at the centre of political contestations, censorship and everyday struggles. The workshop will focus on methodological challenges of researching citizen media, whether these are conceptual, practical, ethical or political.

We welcome proposals for 15-minute presentations which discuss any topic relating to the methodologies of researching citizen media in any of these regions.  Papers should reflect the current research of postgraduates or early career researchers. The workshop will also include a guided training session on methods, and several presentations by expert scholars (detailed below). To apply, please send a title and a 300-word abstract togabrielle.hendry@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk  by the 22^nd of November 2013.

The event is free of charge and open to doctoral students and early career researchers. Limited funds are available to cover travel and accommodation expenses.  To apply for funding assistance, please indicate so on your submission, and outline the estimated cost of your travel.  Successful candidates will be notified in December.

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Please check our website for updates http://citizenmediamanchester.wordpress.com/

The event is organised by Adi Kuntsman, Mona Baker and Elena Barabantseva, and sponsored by The Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies www.ceelbas.ac.uk/ , Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/crcees/ , White Rose East Asea Centre http://www.wreac.org/ , Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World http://www.casaw.imes.ed.ac.uk/ and The British Inter-University China Centre www.bicc.ac.uk

Provisional Programme

1.                  Theory and methods workshop
Luis Pérez González, The University of Manchester, UK:
‘Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives on Citizen Media’

The first part of this workshop will deliver an overview of key theoretical approaches and conceptual networks driving current research on citizen media and different instances of self-mediation. Participants will then be introduced to a range of methods of data collection and analysis in the field, with particular emphasis on qualitative approaches. The final part of the session will involve an interactive discussion of two exploratory case studies illustrating different theoretical and methodological perspectives on the study of citizen media.

2.                  Art and pedagogy workshop

John Johnston, Goldsmith College, UK

3.                  Plenary 1

Astrid Nordin, Lancaster University, UK: ‘Ironic ‘Resistance’ in Chinese Citizen Media Online’

The ‘online generation’ of Chinese citizens, or ‘netizens’, have developed numerous strategies for criticizing and avoiding the heavy online censorship regime to which they are subjected. One aspect of the ironic ego culture of particular interest here is the play with homonymous or near-homonymous words that can help an individual evade censorship software whilst simultaneously critiquing and ridiculing this censorship. Where the methodology of previous scholarship has attempted to pin down this form of expression to mean only one thing (resistance to politics, Bakhtinian carnival), this presentation argues that what is methodologically most interesting about these homonyms is their undecidability as simultaneously either/or and neither/nor. Such a methodological approach can make us better appreciate the complexity of this aspect of Chinese citizen media beyond the resistance/not-resistance binary.

4. Plenary 2

Georgiana Nicoarea, University of Bucharest, Romania, ‘Cairo’s Graffiti Goes Vir(tu)al. Facebook walls, their graffiti avenues and the afterlife’

The graffiti of downtown Cairo has become one of the trademarks of the January 25 Revolution. What looked at first like an over-productive artistic practice appears to be fuelling, through its overwhelming presence, the construction of the revolution’s imagery. Egyptian graffiti has travelled in various forms from real-life walls to Facebook walls and from there to official media and bookstores. This dynamic was initiated by what seemed to be a very natural step into virtual space where liberation graffiti accompanies citizen media and illustrates creative netizen activism. What can this journey tell us about the dynamics of Cairo’s urban inscriptions? Can the virtual public’s interaction with graffiti give more information about its outreach? Does this exposure help Cairo’s graffiti go viral or just virtual? These are the key questions that will be addressed in this talk.

5. Plenary 3

Eugenia Nim, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration Humanities Research Center (Moscow), Altai State University (Barnaul), Russia: ‘”Nanodemonstrations” as Media Events: Networked Forms of the Russian Protest Movement’

‘Nanodemonstrations’ first became part of the Russian protest movement in 2012. Originating in the northern town of Apatity, a wave of ‘doll protests’ – demonstrations and other citizen actions which were staged by using lego dolls and soft toys – swept over many Russian cities. Forbes Magazine included the nanodemonstrations which took place in the Siberian city of Barnaul in the list of ‘the 12 loudest art protest actions in Russia’. The activists used social media to organise these actions; nanodemonstrations were planned as media events from the start. In my talk, I will attempt to apply different methodological approaches to the phenomenon of nanodemonstrations – from the theories of mediatisation of politics to the conceptions of contested urban spaces. My discussion will offer the potential theoretical models and frameworks that can be developed to analyse similar mediatised and theatrical forms of civil resistance.

We are happy to announce the launch of the website for ‘British Born Chinese’, an audio-visual collaborative project between BICC’s Elena Barabantseva and Andy Lawrence (Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester, and All Rites Reversed). This research documentary project explores what it means to be a British born Chinese person in the twenty-first century. The website and the trailer can be viewed here