Nongmingong going online: an ethnography of the mediated work and life experience of the Chinese working-class in ‘digital China’

This dissertation, based primarily on 10-month fieldwork in the Weida factory in Dongguan, China and home visits with workers I met there, explores the subjective experience of nongmingong, rural-to-urban migrant workers, confronting China’s recent ICTs-driven economic restructuring in both work and leisure. This study contributes to sociology of labour research in China by addressing the new complexities brought about by digital technologies, and internationally to debates of digital labour and the future of work from the vintage point of the subjective experience of working class in Global South developing economies. Whether supported by the state or driven by market forces, digital technologies are becoming integrated into nongmingong’s life at an unprecedented pace, adding new complexities to the process of class formation. Incorporating the theory of the mutual shaping of technology and user/society into the larger framework of working class formation, this research takes nongmingong’s ICTs-enabled practices as the starting place for an intersectional analysis that considers class and gender, in order to understand their ICTs-mediated politics of class formation in terms of work and leisure. The findings show that ICTs-enabled jobs provide nongmingong with opportunities to improve the harsh factory working conditions and contribute to their economic security at a time of economic turbulence, allowing them to address their felt responsibilities and concerns in ways that are classed and gendered, especially as regards the family’s subsistence and upward mobility. The findings show further that taking up these opportunities positions nongmingong in various technologically-mediated production regimes, engendering different dynamics of exploitation and resistance. Politics of production aside, in the cultural realm the commercially-produced and politically-censored ICTs-enabled media entertainments allow them to negotiate alienating dagong (working for a boss) life, but they also confine them in a web of dominant meanings. In face of this discursive domination, nongmingong actively select and interpret media meanings, accepting some while rejecting others, according to a bitter and precarious structure of feeling

Radio evolution: conference proceedings

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

CITIES: Energetic Efficiency, Sustainability; Infrastructures, Energy and the Environment; Mobility and IoT; Governance and Citizenship

This book collects important contributions on smart cities. This book was created in collaboration with the ICSC-CITIES2020, held in San José (Costa Rica) in 2020. This book collects articles on: energetic efficiency and sustainability; infrastructures, energy and the environment; mobility and IoT; governance and citizenship

'Working the Crowd': Enacting Cultural Citizenship Through Charged Humor

Like many cultural practices, comic performance is one of a host of weapons in the arsenal of tactics, strategies, and offensive maneuverings available to individuals and communities seeking to redress inequitable distributions of wealth, power, rights, and cultural visibility. This dissertation examines contemporary jesters opting to use humor to develop community, instruct and mobilize audience members, and lobby for political and cultural inclusion. It is a kind of humor that illumines one's position in a specific socio-political, historical matrix; it is humor that creates community and conversely demonstrates the ways in which one does not belong. An examination of the economy--the production, exchange, and consumption--of this humor reveals how and why comics produce charged humor or humor that illumines one's status as second-class citizen and how this kind of humor is consumed in the US. I employ a mixed-methods qualitative approach using ethnography, archival research, and critical discourse analysis to investigate comic performances: stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and one-woman shows. Throughout, I draw from dozens of contemporary comics performing in the US, but take as case studies: Robin Tyler, a Jewish lesbian comic and activist who is currently spearheading the marriage equality movement in California; Micia Mosely, a Brooklyn-based, Black, queer woman whose one-woman show, Where My Girls At?: A Comedic Look at Black Lesbians, is touring the country; and a group of young people (eighteen and under) participating in Comedy Academy programs (a non-profit arts education organization in Maryland), allowing them to author and perform sketch comedy. My sources for this project include popular culture ephemera such as print and electronic media, public commentary, documentaries about stand-up comedy, interviews with comics and industry entrepreneurs, performance and program evaluations, comic material (jokes), and performance texts. Drawing from nation and citizenship theories, cultural studies, performance studies, and a number of identity-based disciplines, I argue that humor intervenes on behalf of minoritarian subjects and it is part of our task to read these performances for the tactics and approaches they supply for being fully incorporated in the national polity