Humanity: Biao Xiang - Power to Knowledge!
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ZOOM:
The talk is based on two articles: "The nearby: A scope of seeing" and "Suspension: Seeking Agency for Change in the Hypermobile World". I will give a factual account about why and how I wrote the two articles, and then raise the question: how can I deal with the gap between a concept’s capacity of public mobilization (resonance) versus its theoretical novelty/scholarly contributions. "Power relies on knowledge.” This is a common critique, of both power and knowledge, by social researchers. While the knowledge that they challenge—the bureaucratic, the commercial and the technological—is becoming more powerful every day, the critics’ own knowledge acquires little power and is rarely consequential. This is not because their topics are irrelevant. But their specific analyses are often detached from the people who are struggling. Critical social knowledge has no life unless it is effectively communicated to the public. This talk explores possible ways to develop “communicative knowledge”—insights that speak to targeted populations and mobilize them to re-examine their own life. Communicative knowledge requires a new ecology of research and dissemination.
The talk will be followed by short responses by Raivo Vetik, Zhou Maojia and Alessandro Rippa from Tallinn University.
Bio: Biao Xiang is the director of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department Anthropology of economic experimentation in Halle, Germany. He has worked on various types of migration—internal and international, unskilled and highly-skilled, emigration, left behind and return—in China, India and Australia. Through the lens of migration, he has examined the changing Chinese state, labour relations in the high-tech sector in India, and other political economy issues in Asia. Currently Xiang is re-examining the multifaceted implications of mobility and immobility for societies and individuals, as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition he is studying social debates in China, social research practices in the global South, and new patterns of economic circulation.
Biao Xiang studied sociology at Beijing University, China, and received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK. He worked at Oxford from 2004. Xiang is the winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize for his book Global Bodyshopping and the 2012 William L. Holland Prize for his article ‘Predatory Princes’. His 2000 Chinese book 跨越边界的社区 (published in English as Transcending Boundaries, 2005) was reprinted in 2018 as a contemporary classic. His work has been translated into Japanese, French, Korean, Spanish, and Italian
