[ecrea] JoC Publishes Special Section on Global to Village

The International Journal of Communication 
Publishes a Special Section on
Global to Village            While McLuhan’s famous “global village” 
concept invokes the village in
a metaphorical sense without paying any attention to rural issues, media and
rural development was a primary concern in communication as a nascent
post-World War II social science discipline. Today, despite massive
urbanization and various premature pronouncements about the “death of the
peasantry,” the size of the world’s rural population is larger than
ever, and rural people all over the world continue to demonstrate themselves
to be formidable social forces and cultural agents.  How can we deepen 
the study of global communication?  How can the
communication field renew its engagement with the rural population and
village communities in our globalized and digitalized world?  How to 
conceptualize and integrate the urban–rural divide, and along with
it, the “metabolic rift” that Marx had also concerned himself with, as a
relevant analytical framework for research perspectives that have
systematically privileged the urban and prioritized the labor–capital
relationship in studying the intersections of communication, culture and
global capitalism?  In the Summer of 2015, Yuezhi Zhao, a Canadian-based 
communication scholar
and editor of this Special Section, took a group of young Canadian scholars
to Heyang, her native Chinese village, to “ground” their respective
research topics in the rural context.  Participants included current Simon
Fraser University (SFU) doctoral students and graduates of both SFU and the
Communication University of China global communication MA double-degree
program. The result is a test bed in a new rural communication research
agenda and a unique experiment in global communication pedagogy.
 Informed by the transcultural political economy of a global communication
perspective and immersed in field research in the village, this “Global to
Village: Grounding Communication Research in Rural China” Special Section
turns McLuhan’s global village concept inside out. In combining political
economy with field research and engaging with the multifaceted lived
experiences of villagers, Heyang serves as a vantage point from which global
systems and systemic issues are reassessed, reexamined, and even reimagined.
The insights generated by the papers add nuances to the grand narratives of
China’s rise and its soft power projection overseas. They also demonstrate
the pressing need for communication and cultural scholars to move beyond the
instrumentally focused concerns with information technologies and
development to engage with the place of the rural in the sustenance of
cultural identity, community, and local ecology, as well as ways to live a
“good life.”  We invite you to read these articles at ijoc.org that 
published in the
International Journal of Communication on October 30, 2017
____________________________________________________________
     Introduction to Global to Village: Grounding Communication 
Research in Rural
China
Yuezhi Zhao
 The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Rural Nostalgia in Xi-Era
China: The Case of Heyang
Linda Qian
 When Technological Closeness Begets Social Distancing: From Mobile 
Phones to
Wired Radio and a Yearning for the Mass Line in Rural China
Byron Hauck
 A Dreamland or the Land of Broken Dreams: Juxtaposed Conceptions of 
the Good
Life in Heyang
Xiaoxing Zhang
 Toward Multiple Conceptions of Human-Nature Relationship: The
“Human-Nature Unity” Frame Found in a Chinese Village
Sibo Chen
 Reading Movement in the Everyday: The Rise of Guangchangwu in a Chinese
Village
Maggie Chao
Research as Communicative Praxis: Crossing the Urban–Rural Divide in
Understanding Hong Kong's Occupy Central Movement
Vanessa Kong
 Rewiring UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre and Rural Peripheries: Imagined
Community and Concrete Inequality from France’s Corsica to China’s
Heyang
Joseph Nicolai
 _____________________________________________________________
Larry Gross
Editor
Arlene Luck Managing Editor
 Yuezhi Zhao
Guest Editor
___________________________________________________
International Journal of Communication (IJoC)
USC Annenberg Press
University of Southern California
http://ijoc.org/

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