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Oct. 26 / Title

Dr. Carwyn Morris (SOAS)

Nov. 26 / Circulating the Scene: Collective Meaning-Making in China’s Early Rock Music Magazines

Nevin Domer (PhD, Hong Kong Baptist University)

Dec. 26 / Motion as Archive: En/Decoding the Body in Martial Arts

Dr. Yumeng Hou (National University of Singapore)

Traditional archives preserve knowledge by fixing it in space, whereas embodied knowledge endures through continuous practice, repetition, and transformation. Martial arts exemplify this dynamic by relying on diverse forms of mediation — from oral formulas and illustrated manuals to modern motion capture — to demonstrate, transmit, and renew movement. How do these media translate motion and condition what knowledge becomes accessible? How do computational processes mediate this, converting traces into data representations of lived cultural memory? This talk seeks to address these questions from within the practice.

Feb. 27 / Sinotrash Euromaxxing

Dr. Dino Ge Zhang (University of Bergen)

Mar. 27 / The Three-Body Effect: The New Afterlives of Chinese Science Fiction

Dr. Gwennaël Gaffric (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)

This talk explores Chinese science fiction after 2015, in the wake of the international success of The Three-Body Problem. It examines the various ways the genre has been appropriated and repackaged by cultural industries, political institutions, or global markets. It will also consider how Chinese science fiction continues to reinvent itself through new voices, new themes, and new forms of popular expression.

Mar. 27 / Error-Correction Features and User Participation on Chinese Online Literature Platforms: An Empirical Study

Dr. Pei Lin (南京大学)

Apr. 27 / The Taste of Ordinariness in Contemporary Chinese Comics

Norbert Danysz (PhD, Université Lumière Lyon 2) 

Comics in China have long been published under the hegemony of the lianhuanhua. This mediatic form is defined by the use of a small and horizontal book format, a single image on the page (almost always detached from the text), thin paper and often poor printing (in black, except for the cover). Lianhuanhua as the mass-produced comics material in 20th-century China have declined in the 1980s, leaving space for “new manhua” to develop, following the example of comics in Japan. However, the characteristics of lianhuanhua are appropriated again on the scene of alternative comics today. This presentation will show how this renewed appropriation of a specific form can channel the expression of a taste of ordinariness in the comics medium. Based mainly on works by Yancong, but also by other alternative authors such as Woshibai, Deng Hao and Fenta, and drawing on concepts developed by comics scholars Greice Schneider and Thierry Groensteen, the presentation will connect contemporary Chinese comics to the idea of the trivial and the ordinary, on the multiple levels of the narration, the graphic realization, as well as the material production and distribution of the comic books.