by Mark Harrison
The political meaning of the virus is contending constantly with its biological realities. But as its transmission has slowed in Asia, it is leaving behind newly calcified traces of the long-standing enmities, political compromises and aspirations of different modernist visions set in place in the early 20th century history of modernisation in Asia.
by Sikong Zhao
This short essay aims at reflecting upon the way the Covid-19 crisis has consolidated the popular Chinese perception of the connection between official institutions, party membership and grass-roots participatory politics with Chinese characteristics. Nation-wide expectations for effective management, organizational capabilities and rapid implementation have been very popular in a country with more than 1.4 billion people.
19 – 20 November
Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
You are warmly invited to attend the Modernity and Civilisation 2.0 Conference presented by Thesis Eleven.
We call for papers under the broad horizons of these arcs, modernity and civilisation, working within and beyond the fields engaged by Thesis Eleven over the last forty years. Agnes Heller’s theories of modernity and its competing logics offer one frame of reference. The Western discourses she worked within also reach back to the Greeks and beyond. The narratives and interests inhabited by our Chinese colleagues reach into new modernities and back to long Chinese traditions of civilisation. These are possible parameters for papers. We are open to suggestion for other ideas.
