Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in China: The Construction of the Chinese Identity on Television Show Singer

Even though the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is known as a culturally unified state with a nationalism propensity, it has a long multicultural history, 56 ethnic groups, a globalized economy, and a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle. China demonstrates the qualities of a cosmopolitan country in naturalizing the cultural variety and digesting social and cultural conflicts within the nation-state. Firstly, the cultural differences in China come from not only ethnic groups but also customs from various regions. Hence, the emphasis on Chinese history and traditional culture, especially Confucius ideology, are critical factors in constructing a unified Chinese identity. Moreover, Greater China and the pan-Chinese nation are used to include people from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and all ethnic Chinese around the globe. Meanwhile, under the influence of globalization, China becomes home to people who are not ethnic Chinese. The modern Chinese community represents the value of cosmopolitanism, naturalizing the existence of foreign visitors and multiracial Chinese. As one of the most popular programs on Chinese television, under the direction of the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), the production of winners on Singer (also known as I am a Singer) reflects the construction of an imaginary modern Chinese community. Through analysis on performances, interviews and comments related to the finals of three key winners (the Mongols Chinese winner Han Lei, the Chinese American winner Coco Lee, and the British winner Jessie J), this paper will discuss the confluence of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the construction of an imagined Chinese identity. The representation of Singer depicts an open, modern, and diversified cultural sphere, in which multiethnic, multinational, and multiracial appearances are naturalized

Mr Interdiction, the 1980s War on Drugs, and Building Future Infrastructure for Facial Recognition Technologies

By the late-1980s, human-centric facial recognition technologies (FRTs) were fast becoming obsolete; the increase in global mobility of goods and populations put increasingly greater stress on human-centric identification systems. The accompanying biopolitics of flow and control, grounded in securitization, demanded monitoring of continuous movement and the idea of stopping each face for sustained human observation quickly grew outmoded. This paper examines the shift from human-centric FRTs to automated FRTs, characterized by the establishment of the Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) database (1993-96) and the later Face Recognition Vender Tests (2000-present). This trajectory is defined by the aforementioned shift from technologies rooted in disciplinary biopolitics to those based in flow and control, that is paralleled by the turn from Cold War ideological battles towards the War on Drugs as the central truth regime justifying the establishments of improvement of FRTs into the turn of the millennium.Sponsored by the American Counter Drug Technology Program, in partnership with DARPA, construction of the FERET began in 1993. Not only was this database essential to the later Face Recognition Vendor Tests (FRVTs), but it also provided incredibly influential and expansive documentation and methodologies for the creation and deployment of future facial recognition technologies (FRT). Such infrastructure remains deeply relevant in a post-9/11 world, in particular during the ongoing crisis of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the near future of climate catastrophe and mass migration

L’écriture d’une/comme Infrastructure

On a typical afternoon on Zoom, a few months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a colleague of Hubert’s interrupted the conversation to share that he had purchased the same office chair as him—an Ikea chair, which they had both chosen because of its respectable price-quality ratio. In the weeks that followed, that chair seemed to multiply from one Zoom screen to the next, gradually taking over the uncertain material conditions of the remote university. While sharing this anecdote with Monica as we began editing this issue, we realized that this moment of mutual recognition was emblematic of the situation’s configurations. This movement of replacing kitchen chairs of questionable quality into ergonomic work furniture seemed a banal testimony to the strange ambivalence of the transition of our academic activities online, prompting us, at rhythms somewhat synchronized, to reimagine the material and aesthetic configurations of our daily lives. Lors d’un après-midi comme les autres sur Zoom, quelques mois après le début de la pandémie du COVID-19, un collègue d’Hubert interrompt la conversation afin de partager s’être procuré la même chaise de bureau que lui – une chaise Ikea, qu’ils avaient tous deux choisie en raison de son rapport qualité-prix somme toute respectable. Dans les semaines qui suivirent, cette chaise lui a semblé se multiplier d’un écran Zoom à l’autre, s’emparant progressivement des conditions matérielles incertaines de l’université à distance. En partageant cette anecdote à Monica, alors que nous commencions l’édition de ce numéro, nous en sommes venus au constat que ce moment de reconnaissance mutuelle parlait bien des configurations de la situation. Ce mouvement de remplacement des chaises de cuisine de qualité discutable en chaises de travail ergonomique témoignait banalement de l’étrange ambivalence de la transition de nos activités universitaire en ligne, nous incitant, à des rythmes somme toute synchronisés, à revoir les configurations matérielles et esthétiques de nos quotidiens

'Fit for the Job': A Programmatic Inquiry on Style and Aesthetics in the Workplace

This article showcases a few main points of the theoretical frame in organizational communication I have been working on for my doctoral research on the aesthetic notion of “style”. Maxwell (2013) in his book on qualitative research methodology proposes to initiate a research design by considering the personal motivations that push us to work in the direction we designate ourselves. For my part, the moment that triggered my scientific interest in style is concretely certain experiences that I had in the restaurant business where I worked for several years, those of a form of selection of workers that seemed to be operated on the level of aesthetics. I present a brief autoethnographic overview of those experiences, then turn to theoretical approaches potentially helpful in making sense of them

Sonic Difference: Reflexive Listening and the Classification of Voice

Listening is not a passive practice, but an active response and construction of the exterior world. Although categorizing voices with identity markers helps self-orientation, it can perpetuate false distinctions between “us” and “other” due to the voice’s continually changing, multi-faceted sound and resulting meanings. Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) argues that “listening operates as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance in the shadow of vision’s alleged cultural dominance” (p. 4). Attaching a physical or mental image to a sound produces a sense of intimacy and reassurance that we understand the world. But these are false understandings due to the voice’s ability for alteration. Listening does not dismiss racial essentialism, but culturally reconstitutes it. Difference exists, what matters is how we classify these differences. Listening is important to review because it helps people reflect on their own listening practices that may be taken for granted. By philosophically theorizing listening, we as scholars may come to an understanding of aurality as offering new ways of perceiving and interpreting the world sonically. This article examines how the sound of the voice has discriminatorily been valued and how listening to sound in different ways can help address these discriminatory practices of essentialism that have become standardized. People can begin reflecting on how their listening influences their understanding of sound and voice as markers of identity by practicing “pausing” (Eidsheim, 2019) and “listening out” (Muscat, 2019), two reflexive modes of interpretation challenging dominant listening practices grounded in Western thought and value

Boom and Bust Archaeology: Examination of Discourses of Historical Value in the Alberta Historical Resource Value System

As a discourse analysis of historical resource assessment documents and interviews with professional archaeologists, this study aims to inspect and critique the production of value in the Alberta historical resource value (HRV) system. The system of evaluation for historical value creates what can be described as a presence-absence model of archaeological significance that limits the ability for archaeologists to interpret and subjectively determine the historical value of materials. In addition, current systems often rely on a contractual relationship between archaeologists and industry to produce these reports, and rarely incorporate indigenous perspectives of significance. With a focus on the assumptions and functional result of HRIA assessments, we can examine the repercussions of the contemporary archaeological evaluative model within Alberta. A goal of this nascent assessment is to provide the opportunity for evaluation of a system that largely exists below the surface of public interest but has vast implications for future access to shared historical resources

Alexa, Please: Babysit My Child

According to the Statistics Canada report from 2019, when it comes to the amount of time spent online, Canada beats out every other country in the world. This has likely been amplified due to the stay-at-home order caused by the COVID-19 crisis, hence why the new Bill C-11 will strengthen the current policies defending Canadians from corporate digital overstep. Alexa, Please: Babysit My Child will explore, analyze, and evaluate Amazon's neuro-capitalistic technologies, specifically pertaining to the technologies made for child-use. Neuro-capitalism is dangerous as it speaks to controlling the mind through the current hyper-technological society. Jurisdictional complexity surrounding A.I. and cybersecurity can be mitigated by government-funded education. Therefore, my research explores the question: From a neuro-capitalistic & digital-colonial standpoint, to what extent are Amazon's child-targeted technologies' (such as Kindle 4 Kids) consistent with the privacy policies of the new, proposed Bill C-11? This policy analysis will consist of three sections—first, an analysis of Amazon's Kindle 4 Kids Terms and Conditions (Site 1). Second, an evaluation of Bill C-11’s ability to protect children from the pernicious aspects of neuro-capitalism (Site 2). Lastly, a compare and contrast section of the two entities, ending with a discussion of the findings. Particularly during the COVID-19 crisis, we must be sure that the Government of Canada is doing everything in their power to aid the youth of the country that spends the most time online and the most time with their babysitter: Alexa.&nbsp

Graduate Students’ Exploration of Opportunities in a Crisis: A White Paper

The following white paper details the University of Calgary’s 2021 graduate student conference titled, ‘Opportunities in a Crisis.’ This white paper works to describe how graduate students explore the terms ‘opportunities’ and ‘crisis’ within their research interests. These research interests were interdisciplinary to various fields such as telecommunications policy, algorithmic studies, critical race theory, and video game studies to list a few. Through this conference, we observed an acute awareness of the ways in which the COVID-19 crisis has impacted research in media activism, feminist media studies, internet infrastructure, and teaching and learning, to mention a handful. This white paper is divided by panel sections, thereby allowing readers to connect with this graduate student conference and help inform future research on topics in communication and media studies, as they are framed in working through these crisis moments in our global history. Our white paper set out to achieve two goals: first, document the presentations and emerging scholarly work of graduate students; and second, reflect on how research can, and very well does, pivot in times of crises, specifically using our current global COVID-19 pandemic as an ongoing, lived experience. This white paper achieves these goals which we believe helps in the preservation of this unique moment in time to be a graduate student

Looking in from the outside: The case of the excluded self-publisher

A significant portion of books on Amazon are self-published using Kindle Direct Publishing. Self-publishers are given an opportunity to share their work with the world with a few clicks of their mouse. However, traditional publishing infrastructures are not as welcoming to the self-publisher. This paper undertakes to perform a policy analysis of government funding frameworks available to workers of the Canadian publishing industry. Through performing a discourse analysis, the study finds that the self-publisher is ineligible to apply for funds and grants from the government both on the provincial and the federal levels. The self-publishing business model is not recognized as a legitimate one and is often equated with vanity publishing, which comes with a stigma. Furthermore, traditional publishing industry workers act as gatekeepers who also exclude the self-publisher from the conversation around the changing landscape of the Canadian publishing industry. Even though the self-publisher should be recognized as a legitimate worker of the cultural industries, they are not acknowledged as such both by government officials who distribute grants and traditional publishers. This study adds to the limited scope of research conducted on self-publishing in order to break the boundaries that self-publishers encounter. The study concludes with recommendations to assess the process of the distribution of government funds and grants in order to incorporate the changing practices of the cultural industries and incorporate new business models such as self-publishing

Introduction to the Simon Fraser – University of Calgary Special Issue

With this year’s graduate student conferences hosted separately at the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University, our goal was to encourage discussion and debate around the topic of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has been at the forefront of public attention; even forcing our respective conferences into the disembodied safety of virtual space. However, it is important to remember that COVID-19 is not the only crisis faced in recent years; the overdose crisis, crisis of the corporatization of universities, economic crisis, crisis of truth and misinformation, and the looming environmental threat of the Anthropocene, have been with us and will continue to be grappled with into the foreseeable future. Crises echo through the past to the present, such as those experienced by our Indigenous communities. They re-emerge, still to be grappled with and struggled against. As individuals and researchers, we may assume any number of these crises are out of scope or outside our area of expertise. We often fail to consider them. However, crises defy temporality and spatiality as easily as disciplinary borders; both squeezing and stretching, accelerating, and suspending notions of the like. The contributors of this special issue consider an array of crises as they collide with diverse fields and disciplines, encouraging us to reflect on how they intersect our own. Ultimately, we aspire to trouble the notion of crises themselves. Questioning our understanding and reapplying it where we had not previously considered. In these general ‘times of crisis,’ what counts as such? How is it communicated and miscommunicated? What are the effects on resilience, recovery, and possibility? Where can we seize opportunity following a crisis? The Chinese symbol for crisis is composed of two parts: opportunity and danger. Where the Simon Fraser University conference focused on resilience in a crisis, the University of Calgary conference expanded on potentials of opportunity. As invited editors to this special edition, we viewed contributors, not as tackling separate entities of the term ‘crisis,’ but instead, as a framework to building back stronger, seizing an opportunity, and practicing resiliency as we maneuver through this danger to a better future. As Zhang and Li (2018) have argued, it is in a co-creation of both sustainable and resilient development which can lead to assurances of overcoming and withholding a community’s vulnerabilities, or their potential crises. This development may use standards setting as an opportunity to ensure resiliency (Thompson, 1954), encouraging democratic participation for an equal seat at the table, and taking the lessons learned during a crisis to apply to a better future (Brundtland, 1987). In the field of communication, we are oftentimes stretched to an incohesive front based on the competing discourses of the canons of our field (Carey, 1997, 2009; Peters, 1999). The study of communications then is not a discipline, but a field of fields, perhaps a crisis of definition in our own knowledge community. In these competing views we see the beauty of this interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, as reflected in how graduate students across Canada thrive in their specializations. Emerging as a new group of scholars who, as the world was faced by crises all around, produced these articles in the pages which follow for this special edition; we as the invited editors see the ways in which graduate students practice resiliency in their work, seizing opportunities, and overcoming the crises which surround. 危机 Crisis