China: Media-Technology Nexus

Marcus Breen has been teaching in the Department of Communication at Boston College since 2014. He has also taught in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies departments at Northeastern University, Bond University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2018 he initiated a research project on new media and communication in China at the invitation of Mr Yongchun Lang. Dr Breen has published articles in a variety of journals and book chapters. His books include Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences, Rock Dogs: Politics and the Australian Music Industry. He produces Boston Media Theory on NewTV. Dr Breen has worked as a consultant in the ICT and regulatory space in Australia, Mexico, The US and the Caribbean for Governments and private firms including Gartner. He was once a rock music critic.

Stephen J. Hartnett is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado, Denver. He served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association. In this capacity he worked as the founder and co-organizer of the Biennial Conference on Communication, Media, and Governance in the Age of Globalization (held in Beijing in 2016, 2018, and forthcoming in 2020), and the Shenzhen Forum on Communication Innovation, New Media, and Digital Journalism (held in Shenzhen in 2019, and forthcoming in 2021). His research in these areas includes the co-edited Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (2018); his book-in-process, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War; articles in the leading communication journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and The Journal of International and Intercultural Communication; and pieces for public audiences, including interviews with activists published on the Public Seminar website and interviews aired on China’s CCTV. As an advocate for American-style free speech and civic engagement who also respects China’s cultural traditions, he has been invited to lecture in Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and has led workshops for the International Department of the Communist Party at meetings in Beijing and Washington, D.C. This work has culminated in his becoming a founding member of the Civic Forum for Global Affairs, an international non-profit that supports education for transformation in U.S.-China relations.

Hartnett is also recognized as an advocate for social justice, focusing on the death penalty and the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He has spent the past thirty years teaching in, writing about, and protesting at America’s prisons and jails. This social justice work has led to lectures and workshops in 28 U.S. states.

James Hoopes is the Murata Professor of Business Ethics History and Society Division at Babson College. He has been engaged in research about global business and ethics for many years, currently undertaking a research project in Malaysia. He has published widely, including False Prophets: The gurus who created modern management and why their ideas are bad for business today. 

Yongchun Lang lives in Beijing. He has been described as “The Anderson Cooper” of China due to his former career as the host of a nightly national news and current affairs program on China Central Television. He is currently working in the private sector, developing an Internet-based trading system.

Micky Lee is an associate professor of media studies at Suffolk University, Boston. She has written about information, technologies, and finance from a feminist perspective. Her latest books are Alphabet: The Becoming of Google (Routledge) and Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises (University of Westminster Press).

Jingfang Liu, originally from Beijing, is an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism, Fudan University in Shanghai. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California. She conducts research and teaches in the broad areas of environmental communication, organization and strategic communication, and ICT for social change. She is a recipient of numerous research grants, such as a recent Humanities and Social Science Research Grant by the Chinese Ministry of Education, Shanghai Pujiang Talent Plan Research Grant, and a U.S. National Science Foundation grant for her Ph.D. dissertation (on Green Information Technologies in Silicon Valley). She has published in leading international academic journals such as the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Chinese Journal of Communication, as well as various chapters in books such as the Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation. She serves as reviewer for and on the editorial board of several international academic journals and book series. She is co-editing a book with Phaedra Pezzulo titled Green Communication and China: On Crisis, Care, & Global Futures, which will be published by the Michigan State University Press in 2020.

Baifeng Sun has been working as an educator in the cross-cultural field for more than 20 years. She was the founder of Learning Chinese Language journal in 2003. She taught in China and the US in secondary schools for over a dozen of years before working at The University of Massachusetts, Boston. She received an Ed. D from UMass Boston in 2017. Her research interest is Confucianism and its influence in educational leadership.

Dr. Ying Xiao is an associate professor of film and media studies and Chinese studies at the University of Florida. She received her PhD. from Cinema Studies at New York University. Her teaching and research interests primarily concentrate on Chinese-language films (mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong), Chinese in Hollywood, Classical Hollywood cinema in the sound era, popular music, youth culture, sound studies, theories of globalization and trans nationalism, Buddhism and film, and the discourse of gender and sexuality.

She is the book author of China in the Mix: Cinema, Sound, and Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and has published many articles on neoliberalism and Chinese film industry, Chinese hip hop culture, Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film, and Chinese documentaries. Before joining the University of Florida, she was involved in a series of TV and documentary productions. She has participated in the curator-ship of Reel China Documentary Film Festival since 2004 and organized “DV China and Social Change” film series and workshop in 2011, “Sound of China: Folklore, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Chinese Hip Hop” symposium in 2013, and “Shanghai in a Global Context: Cinema, Media, and the Crossing of Imaginations” international workshop in 2017. Dr. Xiao was a visiting professor and research fellow in Fudan University in 2017 and taught many universities including Xiamen University in 2018. She sits on three editorial boards for the internationally acclaimed journals and serves as a manuscript reviewer for many academic journals and presses.