SEARCH EVENTS
Decentralised Technologies and Global Chinese Communities
Join us for a dynamic symposium exploring the transformative impact of decentralised technologies—such as blockchain, DeFi, DAOs, and cryptocurrencies—on global Chinese communities.
This event will examine how these communities are reimagining networks, identities, and cultural practices through decentralisation, often challenging Western-centric narratives and fostering innovative, community-based models rooted in Chinese cultural and political contexts. Topics include grassroots experimentation, state-aligned visions of decentralisation, and the development of infrastructure, from mining operations to digital currencies, that underpin these technologies’ social and economic dimensions.
Bringing together leading scholars from STS, media, communication, and cultural studies, this symposium aims to deepen understanding of how decentralised systems intersect with Chinese transnational communication, societal organization, and historical traditions of decentralisation and explore their innovations and tensions. Participants will explore the ideological, infrastructural, and everyday practices shaping decentralised ecosystems, highlighting Chinese contributions to technological innovation and cultural transformation. This event offers a rich platform for discussing the role of decentralised technologies in shaping new publics, media systems, and transnational networks within Chinese contexts and beyond.
This event is organised in partnership between the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China and ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society, Australia.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Ellie Rennie
Prof Ellie Rennie is an Associate Investigator at the RMIT University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).
Ellie is Principal Research Fellow in RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre. She is also a member of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub. Ellie’s current research is focused on social and policy questions arising from automation technologies, including blockchain. She has also worked extensively on the topic of digital inclusion, particularly in relation to remote Australia and Indigenous communities.
Janet Roitman
Janet Roitman is a Professor at RMIT University and founder-director of The Platform Economies Research Network. She is also an executive member of the Digital Ethnography Research Center at RMIT and sits on the Council of Advisors for the Platform Cooperativism Consortium.
Her research focuses on financial practices, the anthropology of value, and emergence forms of the political. Her current work investigates financial technologies, the development of capital markets, and middle-class politics in Africa. This work assesses the role of fintech platforms in generating actionable data and new asset classes as the basis for emergent domestic capital markets in West Africa.
Nicholas Loubere
Nicholas is an Associate Professor at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University and the co-editor of the Made in China Journal. His current research examines informal patterns and processes of Chinese globalisation, focusing on Chinese participation in resource extraction booms from the 19th-century gold rushes to the current phenomenon of cryptocurrency mining. He is the author of Development on Loan: Microcredit and Marginalisation in Rural China (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and the co-author of Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Wang Jing
Wang Jing is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Business at NYU Shanghai. She is also an Affiliated Faculty of the university’s Program on Creativity and Innovation and the Center for Global Asia. Jing received her Ph.D. in Communication and Information from Rutgers– The State University of New Jersey. Her research studies how information and communication technologies influence the financial domain in the global context. Her work has been published in the leading journals in Communication Studies and China Studies, such as Big Data & Society, Telecommunications Policy, Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, The Political Economy of Communication, Platforms & Society, The China Quarterly, and the Journal of Contemporary China. In addition to her academic roles at NYU Shanghai, Jing serves as Associate Editor of the journal Finance & Society and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Cultural Economy and Cultural Studies.