Recollections: A subset of the project on posters of the cultural revolution

The rate of change in China - both in terms of economics and expectations - is such that history is increasingly important and yet remarkably absent from many conversations. There are political reasons for this, and there are pragmatic challenges to the business of scholarship. It is extremely challenging to keep up even with the descriptive work of scholarship, let alone the attendant necessity of analysis, contextualization, and judgement. The environment is intensely busy: media platforms, capabilities, and functions are multiplying, and every new device shifts the boundaries of information, political communications, and entertainment. Everyday life and indeed the formations of subjectivity are implicated in such constant change, such that the very grounds for investigation of the social are insecure.