Author: Wanning Sun File Type: pdf Behind Chinas growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the countrys hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody Chinas most intractable problems of inequality. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author argues that despite the critical role their labor has played in enabling and sustaining the countrys remarkable economic growth, workers and peasants have become the nations subalterns. Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows that in the face of the harsh reality of injustice and discrimination, Chinas rural migrants engage in media and cultural practices that are at once both mundane and profoundinvariably imbued with hope and dignity, and motivated by the dream of a better life. Exploring the cultural politics of inequality in post-Mao China, this engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world. **Review Wanning Suns Subaltern China succeeds in making an original intervention in an already crowded field. The value of this study lies in its emphasis on cultural productions not only about but by rural migrant workers. . . .Sun offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of these cultural expressions of workers voices. . . .I could not put this book down once I began to read it. Sun offers us a close-up view of workers hopes and desires, pains and disappointments, and understandings of their exploited situations, putting these in the context of neoliberal economic growth. I look forward to teaching this book in my classes. (The China Quarterly) This is a conceptually sophisticated and ethnographically rich analysis of the cultural politics of Chinas rural migrant workers. (Duke East Asia Nexus (DEAN)) This is a highly original and extremely timely work of first-class scholarship. By focusing on migrant workers and foregrounding the media and cultural politics of inequality in contemporary China, Wanning Sun has offered a compelling and much-needed corrective to dominant narratives about Chinas rise. (Yuezhi Zhao, Simon Fraser University author of Communication in China Political Economy, Power, and Conflict) Infusing a rich media study with an engaged ethnography, Wanning Sun innovatively unravels the contested and nuanced relationship between the state and the subalterns of migrant workers, who appropriate and resist hegemonic media forms, and at the same time invent new genres and forms to reconstruct and reposition themselves. An intriguing read, this book is a major contribution to the cultural politics of social inequality and class in contemporary China. (Tiantian Zheng, State University of New York, Cortland) Wanning Suns original, probing, and poignant exposure of the voice of Chinas rural migrants in their role as subaltern artist captures a heretofore unknown dimension of the underbelly hidden beneath Chinas storied economic success. This heady, jarring, and powerfully written and argued treatise on the cultural politics of this underclass sparkles with insights, empathy, and nuance, as it traces both the possibilities for and the depoliticization of this egregious emblem of the countrys searing inequality. (Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine) Only recently have we started to get a sense of the hidden fault lines of social struggle in contemporary China and how media practices are implicated. Wanning Suns remarkable new book is a crucial landmark in this expanding literature. Passionate and engaged, drawing on rich fieldwork from a variety of sites, Sun gives us a vivid sense of how more than 260 million migrant workers use and appropriate mainstream and personal media in their search for some form of political voice. Essential reading. (Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science) Behind Chinas growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the countrys hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author illuminates the harsh reality of inequality and discrimination experienced by Chinas rural migrant workers, who have become the nations subalterns. Sun focuses especially on how workers use media and cultural practices to negotiate everyday injustice, and to emerge with hope and dignity. This engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world. About the Author Wanning Sun is professor of media and communication at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Author: Shaun Gallagher File Type: pdf Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including intentionality, representation, the affect, perception, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. Gallagher argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology and cognitive science. Enactivism is presented as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Gallagher argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. He offers an account of the continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. Gallaghers analysis also addresses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in-the-world rather than in-the-head they are situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices. **