Invitation to Virtually Attend Lecture: Keren Wang, "Social and Moral Engineering in the Age of Big Data: Personalized 'Pillars of Shame' and the Chinese Social Credit System"

 



 It is my great pleasure to pass along the announcement of what is going to be a fantastic lecture by my colleague, friend and former student, Keren Wang, now an ACLS Post-Doctoral Fellow at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia USA).  The lecture, "Social and Moral Engineering in the Age of Big Data: Personalized 'Pillars of Shame' and the Chinese Social Credit System" examines one of the most sensitive areas of legal development--the transformation of the modalities and language of law from text to symbolic action, and its enforcement from an administrative task exogenous to the act, to the development of systems of governmentality (the governance of modes of thought in this case) grounded in quantification and nudging strategies that internalize compliance.  The way that traditional textual-qualitative-exogenous legalities will be aligned with symbolic-quantitative-endogenous legalities will reshape our understanding of law for some time to come.

The specific focus in this case is China and its  pioneering work in this context organized within regimes we have come to label generically Social Credit. 

The construction of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) represents one of the most ambitious social engineering projects in post-Mao China. It is also arguably the most significant governance-by-data experiment thus far in the 21st Century. This lecture explores the ways in which the SCS project was prompted by a ritual impulse to inculcate Chinese social moral character in the big data age.

The lecture will take place Monday 6 February 2023 from 7.00 to 8.00 PM (US East Coast Time) and may be accessed via ZOOM:

https://emory.zoom.us/j/94409772969 

 The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures (REALC) at Emory University, an interdisciplinary department dedicated to the study of languages and cultures in the geographic continuum from Eastern Europe through Eastern Asia. It is the first of this semester's Faculty Spotlight Lecture Series.

I hope you will consider attending.