Registration for RCCHC "Science, Technology, Society and Culture" Talk Series - Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China

Topic: Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China 

Speaker: Prof. WU Ka-ming 

                Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong 

Date: 13 November 2026 (Fri)

Time: 15:30 - 17:20

Venue: TU201, PolyU Main Campus

Language: English

Abstract: 

    This talk examines how Chinese citizens negotiate the everyday in a landscape shaped by expanding urban facilities, improved city infrastructure, digital technologies, and a pervasive surveillance regime. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with urban volunteers, the author explores how citizens not only engage with new urban spaces and upgraded facilities but also experiment with political, social, and cultural forms of participation. The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice through which citizens navigate hierarchies of urban and rural status, gender, age, and ability while contesting top-down, mega-event-driven forms of urbanisation. It introduces the concept of infrastructural urbanism to analyse a form of urban modernity characterised by enhanced mobility, expanded civic practices, time-space compression, and broader technological and social transformations. Infrastructural urbanism also offers a framework for understanding how state power, consumption, and surveillance are intertwined in ways that generate new possibilities for political engagement and social change.

Speaker's Biography: 

       Wu Ka-ming is Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. A cultural anthropologist of contemporary China, her research spans Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and China Studies. She is the author of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism (2015), Living with Waste: Economies, Communities and Spaces of Waste Collectors in China (2016), and Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China (2026). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Worldwide Waste.