PhD Defence Yu Sun
Engaging in politics: everyday political talk in online China
Date: 12th July, 2018
Time: 11:00
Venue: the Aula, Academy building (Broerstraat 5, University of Groningen)
Promotor: Prof. M.J. Broersma
Co-promotor: Dr T.S. Graham
On July 12, 2018 at 11:00,Yu Sun will defend her doctoral thesis, Engaging in politics: everyday political talk in online China.
Everyday online spaces may be the new and alternative places where people can talk about politics and engage in it. Accordingly, this study wonders how Chinese citizens’ everyday political talk in such spaces impacts their practice of citizenship and whether they will contribute to an active online public sphere in China.
This dissertation studies those small-scale interactions among ordinary citizens on the Chinese internet in the everyday life context. It shifts the focus to the citizen communications in internet-based everyday spaces beyond those traditional political spaces people join online. For this purpose, I study forums mixing politics with lifestyle issues or non-political online forums. Specifically, the study implies the approach of everyday political talk, which may serve as an alternative way to link Chinese citizens’ personal concerns to politics. Here, everyday political talk does not only imply mundane communicative practices per se but also bears the social-civic culture where those communicative actions take place. In other words, everyday political talk is situated in the local social-cultural context. By studying this, it is possible to probe into how citizens’ everyday life is interwoven with politics and how citizens think about and engage in politics in their lifeworld at the micro-level. Thus, it provides us opportunities to investigate the chances that everyday political talk opens up for the emergence of a public realm that cultivates and sustains a relatively autonomous space for new political formations in China.