Cultural Anthropology is pleased to present

Airing Grievances and the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reform

Julie Y. Chu

Dr. Chu is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China.  She is currently completing a new book entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China's Global Edge.

Monday, November 26, 2018
1:30pm
Friedl Building, Room 225

This talk considers the ways in which legal reform unfolds as a palpable, if vague, “change in the air” in new zones of urban revitalization and port development in contemporary China.  Drawing from various examples of citizen-state struggles over the spread of bad air(s) throughout the rezoned areas of coastal Fuzhou (e.g. the free trade port zone, the touristic city center), I show how redevelopment as filtered through “the law” can operate as a distinctive infrastructural project of climate control to shape the atmospherics of civilian protest; this includes gathering unlikely allies together under a shared cloud of political disaffection and procedural noise to ponder the revolutionary and everyday possibilities of social change in China beyond the current governing logics of “reform."

For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at mamascha@duke.edu