Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, nation states found new ways to assert power under the guise of public health, from closing or tightening borders to expanding the boundaries of acceptable citizen surveillance. As these controls increased in intensity, citizens passions to cross borders seemed to grow in proportion. Pandemic Crossings explores how these processes of boundary making and crossing, often mediated by digital technology despite inequity of access, had profound and often contradictory consequences on individual lives, national politics, and U.S.China relations. This rich and geographically diverse collection of studies informed by everyday, individual experiences contribute new insights to the interplay between digital technologies and state governance during the covid-19 pandemic. It opens up new avenues of research not only on the covid-19 pandemic but also on global health crises more broadly.
Pandemic Crossings presents rich studies of how citizens and states in diverse regions of the world responded to the COVID-19 crisis and how these responses shaped individual lives, global politics, and U.S.China relations. It opens up new avenues of research not only on the covid-19 pandemic but also on global health crises more broadly.
Contents Preface, Bingchun Meng, Guobin Yang, and Elaine J. Yuan
Acknowledgments Part
1. Governing with Digital Tools Infrastructures for the
Public: The Institutional Contexts of the Applications of Digital Technology
in the U.S. during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Elaine J. Yuan Pandemic
Infrastructure, Mediated Mobility, and Urban Governance in China, Yang Zhan
DingTalk and Chinese Digital Workplace Surveillance in Pandemic Times, Yizhou
Xu Access as Method: Hopes, Friction, and Mediated Communication in a Remote
Disability Reading Group, Zihao Lin Part
2. Making Sense of the Pandemic
Chinese Students and Narratives of Freedom before and during COVID-19, Yingyi
Ma and Ning Zhan Cosmopolitan Imperative or Nationalist Sentiment? Mediated
Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic among Chinese Overseas Students,
Bingchun Meng, Zifeng Chen, and Veronica Jingyi Wang Contesting for
Consensus: Social Sentiment toward Fellow Citizens COVID-Related Behavior in
China, Yan Wang and Yuxi Zhang Part
3. Contesting over Narratives Narrating
the Nation during the Global Pandemic: The K-Quarantine and Biopolitical
Nationalism in the Era of COVID-19, Ji-Hyun Ahn What Motivated the Sharing of
Disinformation about China and COVID-19? A Study of Social Media Users in
Kenya and South Africa, Herman Wasserman and Dani Madrid-Morales Chinas
Twitter Diplomacy: Crafting Narratives of COVID-19, Wendy Leutert and
Nicholas Atkinson Contributors Index
Bingchun Meng is a professor in the Department for Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she also co-directs the LSEFudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. She is currently the director of LSE PhD Academy. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She is the author of The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (2018). From 2020 to 2021, she served as a senior fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Wuhan Lockdown, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, and The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. He is also the editor or co-editor of six books.
Elaine J. Yuan is an associate professor in the communication department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on how new forms of communication and technology mediate various social institutions and cultural practices. She has researched extensively on questions regarding network communication, social media, digital platforms, cultural production, and social change. Her book The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society (2021), which examines the role of the Internet as symbolic spaces for the changing cultural practices of privacy, nationalism, and the network market in China, won the 2022 Outstanding Book Award of the Asian/Pacific American Caucus of the National Communication Association.
