We congratulate Ying Qian, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, who will share a 2018-19 Global Humanities Projects Grant for the project “Thinking the Ecological in Media Studies.” The grants, awarded by Columbia University, support projects that engage collaboratively with scholars outside of the United States, with a focus on any topic that brings together flows of knowledge from two or more different world areas, and investigates issues through a prism of global interconnectedness.
Professor Qian, a scholar of Chinese film, literature, and media, will share the Global Humanities Project Grant with her collaborators Debashree Mukherjee (Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies) and Brian Larkin (Barnard College/Department of Anthropology). “Thinking the Ecological in Media Studies” conceives of “ecology” as methodology as well as material reality, both fundamentally predicated on the specificities of time and place. With India, China, and Nigeria as their primary sites of study, the lead faculty hope to initiate a broad conversation on campus on the ways in which media condition our sensory environments, the ecologies of media labor and production, and the urgent need to think with “other” media from “other” places.
Professor Qian and Professor Mukherjee previously taught the Summer 2017 Global Scholars Program “Media Practices in India & China,” which took twelve undergraduates on a six-week exploration of contemporary media industries in Mumbai and Beijing. The program was sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Office of Global Programs, and Columbia Global Centers.
