Suchergebnisse

Informed by Foucault's governmentality, this article examines the making of the smart home in China. Operating within the nexus of security and risk, smart homes foster a discourse of the 'the good life' that accelerates AI's integration into the population's daily life. Taking Xiaomi (a renowned smart home technology company) as a case study, I trace how commercial practices formulate issues of security and risk in three smart home products: smart door lock, home surveillance camera and virtual home assistant. Drawing on visual and discourse analyses of Xiaomi's promotional materials, this analysis is structured around three levels of relationships: (a) trust and ontological security; (b) the practices of government and the practices of self (c) and the technologisation of Chinese society. This analysis demonstrates that Xiaomi further advances the state-driven technologisation of Chinese society, in which subjects are guided to embrace the positive dimensions of technology for self-actualisation and self-management. However, the technology that makes domestic life and the physical home more reliable, less prone to risks and more secure has at the same time further eroded social relations and trust.

This article examines the ways in which taxi driving and China's quest for global ascendency are interlinked and enmeshed. Inspired by de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and his conceptual formulation of "strategy" and "tactic", this article explores how taxi drivers, through their everyday practice of driving, found ways and moments to tactically challenge and appropriate so-called "civility campaigns" and a rising China. By demonstrating the numerous instances of tactics taxi drivers used, I argue that their socio-economic marginality did not, in fact, reduce them to a "powerless" position. I bring in Foucault's analytics of power and governmentality to add to de Certeau's work by helping to explain the intertwined relationship between government and governed to shed light on the complexity implicated in the dynamics of power relations and resistance. I examine the period around the 2008 Beijing Olympics as it involved large-scale attempts to showcase China through (urban) transformation. (JCCA/GIGA)

Introduction: New, old, and uncertain futures / Rolien Hoyng and Gladys Pak Lei Chong -- Analyzing Chinese platform power : infrastructure, finance, and geopolitics / Lianrui Jia and David Nieborg -- Neoliberal business-as-usual or post-surveillance capitalism with European characteristics? The EU's General Data Protection Regulation in a multipolar Internet / Angela Daly -- The global versus the national : creativity in Turkey's game industry / Serra Sezgin and Mutlu Binark -- Making, New Shanzhai, and countercultural values in digital fabrication communities in Shenzhen, China / Daniel H. Mutibwa and Bing1ing Xia -- Platformization of the unlikely creative class : Kuaishou and Chinese digital cultural production / Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet -- Technology translations between China and Ghana : the case of low-end phone design / Miao Liu -- Sensing death in the Mediterranean Sea / Monika Halkort -- Conclusion: Futures in the plural / Jack Linchuan Qiu.

This article maps out how different actors are involved in the promotion and mediation of the Olympics. It looks at the roles of, first, the nation-state, through an analysis of the promotional materials; second, the art world and global companies, through an analysis of the touring exhibition "Sport in Art" and the Beijing art district 798; and third, the Western press and activists, through a brief analysis of the critique of the Games in the Netherlands and the Chinese response to that critique. Our analysis shows that the imageries promoting the Games are never fully under control of their producers. The Beijing Olympics, we argue, should be perceived as a field of contestation, in which conflicting discourses, constituted by different regimes of truth produced by distinct interest groups, vie for global attention. (Manuscript received February 25, 2008; accepted for publication April 1, 2008)