Knowledge, Ideology and Public Discourse in contemporary China

The pandemic, travel restrictions, and political ossification in China have all disrupted communications between Chinese scholars in the humanities and social sciences and their counterparts overseas. For this reason, there is a need to reengage with academic and intellectual trends in contemporary China.

Taking inspiration from new methods in intellectual history and sociology of knowledge, we propose to focus specifically on the question of public knowledge. In the context of a global crisis of public scholarship, how do academic and other knowledge discourses circulate globally and locally? How do scholars in different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences connect their academic inquiries and public interventions? How does government censorship operate in direct and indirect ways, and how does it influence knowledge production in China? What kind of strategies do scholars or publication spaces develop to circumvent various types of censorship? Can we talk about a singular public or is the public domain fragmented? Are there spheres in which certain kinds of discourse can circulate in a limited way? Yet how relevant are writings if they cannot circulate publicly?

The conference will bring together a groups of scholars, including historians, social scientists and independent critics who, from a variety of geographical and disciplinary vantage points, are all engaged in observing and studying academic and intellectual trends in contemporary China.