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Conversations on The Wuhan Lockdown (Book Talk: Guobin Yang with Wei Zhang)

The lockdown of Wuhan in 2020 was the first of its kind in the COVID-19 global pandemic. Keenly aware of the unprecedented nature of this event, many residents in Wuhan took it upon themselves to document its history by recording their personal experiences and sharing them on social media. These acts of citizenship inspired the writing of The Wuhan Lockdown, a book that recounts the extraordinary stories of ordinary people in the first moments of the COVID pandemic. In this conversation, two sociologists discuss the themes of the book and its narrative strategies and explore the meanings of the history and memories of a global crisis that would define the age. Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology of the U of Pennsylvania, and director of its Center on Digital Culture and Society. He is the author of the award-winning The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (Columbia University Press, 2016). His 2-volume Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (Library of Chinese Classics, 2003) is an annotated English translation of the 6th-century Chinese classic of rhetoric and literary theory Wenxin Diaolong. His new book The Wuhan Lockdown has just been published by Columbia University Press. He taught at UHM in Sociology as an Assistant Professor. Wei Zhang is Professor and department chair in UHM’s Dept. of Sociology. She studies the social dimension of health for immigrants and aging adults in Hawaii and beyond, including the United States and the Asia-Pacific.

Event Sponsor
Center for Chinese Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Pauli Tashima, 808-956-2663, china@hawaii.edu, , The Wuhan Lockdown (PDF)