[Commlist] Conference: Narrating Cold Wars

INVITATION

Narrating Cold Wars

An international, interdisciplinary conference at Hong Kong Baptist 
University, 11–13 November 2021

Draft programme and registration details: 
https://www.hkbu.online/narratingcoldwars/ 
<https://www.hkbu.online/narratingcoldwars/>

The year 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the “Cold War”, a 
half-century of superpower rivalry that left few societies untouched. 
Now, there are concerns about a new great power contest between the 
United States and China. Our conference will interrogate “Cold War 
thinking” — from the primacy it gave to relations between nation-states, 
to assumptions about zero-sum competition. It will critically examine 
how these frames are constructed, circulated, mobilised and contested 
through media and culture.

Five keynote speakers, seven roundtable participants, a filmmaker, and 
more than sixty paper presenters will explore the ways in which cold 
wars have been narrated, what these  narratives have left out, and how 
alternative possibilities may be imagined. “We put together 
interdisciplinary panels that address a range of issues including 
transnational cultural production, soft power, humanitarian and 
ecological trauma, migration and exile, and twitter diplomacy,” says 
Kenneth Paul Tan, who curated the programme.

The conference is organised by the Hong Kong Baptist University School 
of Communication and Film in collaboration with the Academy of Visual 
Arts and the Department of Government and International Studies.

Daya Thussu, a member of the organising committee, notes: “As we enter 
the third decade of the twenty-first century, Cold War 2.0 has become 
arguably one of the most contested and controversial geopolitical 
discourses. Does its adoption as the dominant narrative by the global 
media indicate insight or a failure of imagination in a multipolar world?”

Adds Ying Zhu of the Academy of Film, “Time is more than ripe for a 
reappraisal of the Cold War and its historical legacy. Particularly 
amidst the jostling for global influence of competing ideologies between 
established and emerging superpowers, which confines smaller nations and 
alliances in the global pecking order. We are clearly nowhere near the 
end of history.”

Please visit our website for the draft programme and registration 
details: https://www.hkbu.online/narratingcoldwars/ 
<https://www.hkbu.online/narratingcoldwars/>
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