Student profiles
Naying Ren (Noa)
Email: naying.ren@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr Ed. Pulford
Dr Sonja Dobroski
Dr Fiorella Montero-Diaz
Research Summary
Existing research on resistance, predominantly focusing on social movement and activism, finds it increasingly difficult to answer the question of hope and futurity. Music, sounds and venues in which music and sounds are made, performed, heard and circulated represent key sites in which alternative futures might be imagined, constituting an alternative public sphere as civil society is shrinking in China. Meanwhile, previous research on Chinese sounds and music inadvertently erased voices of the marginalised.
Through a lens of queering the sonic borderlands, this research hopes to respond to the question of futurity through an exploration of music worlds, sounds expressing queer feminist aesthetics and their sonic infrastructure. Through multi-sited ethnography, advocacy research and sonic ethnography combined with ethnomusicology, the research aims to contribute to the anthropology of resistance with a queer anarchist lens in a postsocialist media infrastructure.
Research Interests
Anthropology of resistance
Feminism and queer theory
Sound
Borderlands
Technology and infrastructure
Previous publications
Chow, W. and Ren, N., 2019. Queering boundaries: Art, politics and activism in performance art. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 6(1), pp.131-153.