UC Irvine

Documentation as Transmedial Relay examines the rise of different documentary media in Chinese digital media landscapes to intervene in drastic sociopolitical changes between the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. I build a conceptual framework of relay to discuss how digitally-mediated visual, audio, and textual cultures were interrelated to capture shifting realities of ideological change, media fragmentation, political polarization, and economic precarity. Drawing on conceptions of a relay game, a group task of passing the baton from one to another to carry forward the activity, I consider the relay of documentation as a creative, open, and collective mode of social participation within and across media. Four chapters discuss how Chinese cultural producers took up documentary film, podcast, digital video, and social media posting in different moments of urgency to document volatile social changes and transmit their critical consciousness. By showing how they devised new strategies of storytelling to communicate their lived experience in a changing world, I theorize documentation as a critical method for building affective communities across media systems and cultivating new grounds of relatedness during precarious times.

Documentation as Transmedial Relay builds on media ethnography, cultural analysis, and media and political theories to bridge critical area studies, media studies, and studies on contemporary global politics. Anatomizing China’s implicated position within the structural crisis of neoliberal globalization, I take China as a critical site for understanding the shifting global social and media landscapes during this period of accumulated crises and radical uncertainties. Through extensive ethnographies on Chinese digital media platforms such as WeChat, Bilibili, and Little Universe, I examine how geopolitical changes affected real people and their use of media for social engagement. I consider the Chinese experience of transmedial documentation not as an anomaly in the fractured global media ecology, but as a globally-relevant case for testing the limits of response-ability and critical consciousness of ordinary media users and producers within conditions of crisis, precarity, and political constraints. With a focus on the diverse social imaginations and creative strategies of documentation generated by them, this project highlights their shared commitment to living up to radical social changes and inventing alternative futures of ethical cohabitation.