Intimate Exposures to Radical Change

Find out more by meeting Shiqi Lin, doctoral student in Comparative Literature and a member of the Humanities Center Graduate Liaison Network

I am a third-year PhD student from the program of Comparative Literature. My research interests broadly include contemporary Chinese literature and film, political theory, translation studies, urban studies, care ethics and trans-media studies.

In my current work, I am cross-examining various media cultures including film, literary nonfiction, science fiction, pop music and digital media to study how ordinary lives perform creative translations of demolitions and dislocations in the breakneck urban transformations of contemporary China. Growing up in three places in China, I had various intimate exposures to the radical change of urban landscapes and social mentalities pertaining to China’s shifting sociopolitical status in the globe. As an attempt to make sense of everyday lived experience amidst these intense spatiotemporal transformations, my research constantly pushes me to attend to the ways in which people form affective and poetical collectivities through the mediation of literary, cinema and popular culture.