Doing Media Anthropology in China: Production, Reception, Fandom, Ethnography

Doing Media Anthropology in China: Production, Reception, Fandom, Ethnography

Louisa Schein - Professor of Anthropology and Gender & Women's Studies, Rutgers University

Friday, February 17, 2012 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Room 105, Department of Anthropology See map
10 Sachem Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Louisa Schein has been at the forefront of developing media research and methods in anthropology. In this workshop, she talks about her projects, as reflected in and beyond two articles that shall be read beforehand. She introduces several of her approaches and topics, including itinerant ethnography; ethnotextual method; ethnography of production; ethnography of television, consumerism and promotional media; transnational media; celebrity and fandom. In the course of this interactive discussion, she makes a case for incorporating media themes into China research projects on topics as diverse as the state, economic development or minorities. Louisa Schein is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has worked with Hmong Americans for three decades, and has done long-term fieldwork in China on the Miao, especially in Guizhou province. She is author of Minority Rules:The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Duke 2000). She is co-editor of the 2006 collection, Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space, with Tim Oakes and the forthcoming, Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia, with Purnima Mankekar. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Asian Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, Modern China, and American Quarterly. Her current book project is Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora and she is also contributing to the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Chinese Cinema. She has just completed a documentary film Better Places with Peter O’Neill, a sequel about Hmong from Providence, Rhode Island a generation after they were first filmed, and is working on one with Va-Megn Thoj on Hmong health and healing. She is a regular contributor of stories on Hmong/Miao in arts and entertainment to the newspaper Hmong Today where she has also published on Miao Chinese pop star A You Duo. Most recently she has collaborated with Gran Torino lead Bee Vang on antiracist and queering activist work in the wake of the film, including working on production of the satirical youtube video “Thao Does Walt.”

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China