Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
An analysis of censored online tributes following the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, who had been sanctioned by the Chinese government for his efforts to warn about the Covid-19 threat, shows how posters viewed their own circumstances at the time.
This article examines how the death of Li Wenliang, in February 2020, served as an affordance for Chinese netizens to engage with their intimate sense of themselves as political subjects through the interrogative process of scalar inquiry. Li, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who was sanctioned by Chinese authorities in 2019 for warning friends about the virus, was also an eminently normative and successful Han Chinese citizen who many saw as a reflection of themselves. His persecution, public humiliation, and death thus indexed the vulnerability of even the most compliant subjects and triggered an unprecedented public response that included both grief and outrage. Although largely censored within hours, this response continued to emerge throughout the year in a public mega-thread on his Weibo “Wailing Wall.” This article draws on an alternative archive of censored messages on Li's Weibo page—usually described as an affective, apolitical space—to demonstrate how the Wailing Wall also becomes a unique sociomoral space in which people collaboratively reflect upon their sense of themselves as embodied subjects. Scalar inquiry, I suggest, thus emerges as a continual, collaborative, and simultaneously personal and political process of interrogating citizenship and nationhood vis-à-vis the remembered past, the experienced present, and the anticipated future.
Audio recordings of 1954 workshops held by the Highlander Folk School, an integrated adult education institution in southeastern Tennessee, reveal connections between integrated contexts and practices of nonviolent civil disobedience.
In the summer of 1954, the Highlander Folk School, a racially integrated institution located in the hills of Tennessee, hosted a series of workshops on the United Nations. Highlander’s UN workshops cultivated a grassroots globalism that aimed to connect the UN to local action on behalf of racial integration. Yet while the workshops helped raise awareness about the work of the UN, they failed to directly link such global awareness to local action and instead revealed the danger that a certain kind of global optimism would lead to local apathy. By contrast, Highlander’s radical integrationism, by challenging the borders of race, opened a space for other kinds of border crossing, particularly in regard to nonviolent civil disobedience. Audio recordings of Highlander’s workshops provide a rare perspective on the geography of nonviolence. By revealing the geographic imagination of local activists, these tapes allow us to reconceive the transnational history of the American civil rights movement as a grassroots endeavor.