18/05/2026
Synthesis 合: Materialist Approaches to Media and Technology
Co-organizers: Tim Shao-Hung Teng (CUHK) and Shaowen Zhang (Harvard University)
Dates: May 21–22, 2026
Venues: Thursday May 21, Fung King Hey 101; Friday May 22, Fung King Hey 220
Presenters:
Nadine Chan, University of Toronto
Cassandra Guan, University of Chicago
Julia Keblinska, Cambridge University
Jinying Li, Brown University
Yandong Li, University of Washington
Shiqi Lin, Cornell University
Weixian Pan, Queen’s University
Ying Qian, Columbia University
Tim Shao-Hung Teng, CUHK
Moira Weigel, Harvard University
Angela Xiao Wu, New York University
Shaowen Zhang, Harvard University
Discussants:
Angie Baecker (PolyU)
Elmo Gonzaga (CUHK)
Jinying Li (Brown University)
Adam Liebman (CUHK)
Laikwan Pang (CUHK)
Thorben Pelzer (HKUST)
We invite your contribution to a workshop for a special issue volume, provisionally entitled “Synthesis,” examining new directions in Chinese/Sinophone/Global Asia media studies at the crossroads of history, technology, and society. Historians of science and the environment contend that today’s worlds are unimaginable without accounting for the chemical compounds that shape modern human life. Extending this powerful contention beyond media objects, we seek deeper interrogations into media’s entangled materialities. Synthesis, at its broadest denoted by the character he 合, refers to successive chemical, aesthetic, political, and dialectical transformations that have together shaped media politics in the 20th and 21st century Sinophone world. While more conventional histories have centered political upheaval, social change, or artistic tensions, we propose a radical reorientation of media discourse as a foundationally combinatoric process in which reactions among elements, molecules, energies, and their human actants engage in the production of screen, imaging, and digital cultures. Of particular interest is the role that scientific or technical practices (such as those relating to economic trend, engineering, environmentalism, law, management, governance, and corresponding practices of resistance) have played in shaping broader socio-cultural patterns. This includes a call for historical contributions illuminating new facets of Chinese media history, as well as contemporary engagements exploring ongoing topics such as AI.
What is the role of media in exchanges between individual, society, and state? Where is the place of technology in defining relational histories between “China and the World”? Our workshop situates these negotiations principally in factories, laboratories, boardrooms, or marketplaces. These sites host social and scientific cultures continuously mitigating calls for chemical, political, or dialectical synthesis. Accordingly, we define media as technical engines that drive the products, processes, and politics imbricated in ongoing oscillations between chemical sciences, socio-environmental transformations, and extant directions in China/Sinophone/Asia-Pacific studies such as national construction and platform economization in the digital age. As a constellation, our dialogue seeks to contribute a material-based theory of media, as well as new methods of historiographical analysis that forges disciplinary continuities between media studies and histories of science and technology. These dialogues offer further insight around complex questions of power, labor, and governance across nearly a century of transformations from socialism to globalization.
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