Welcome to the research events portal of the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University. Here is where you will find information about upcoming and recent talks, seminars and other public events related to journalism, communication studies, and film, organised by our departments and centres, and/or featuring our researchers. To find out more about our work, please visit our main Research site.
UPCOMING EVENTS
On Friday 6 October 2023, Michael Ng challenges the prevailing narrative that Hong Kong’s freedom of expression is a legacy of British rule of Law. Based on his book Political Censorship in British Hong Kong: Freedom of Expression and the Law (1842–1997) (Cambridge), Ng discusses how Hong Kong came to be a city that championed free speech by the late 1990s. > MORE
HIGHLIGHTS
2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the original Cold War, the half-century of US-Soviet superpower rivalry that left few societies untouched. Our conference interrogated dominant frames of Cold War thinking, examining how these frames are constructed, circulated, mobilised and contested through media and culture. > MORE
June 30, 2021, marked the first anniversary of Hong Kong’s new national security law. A roundtable of academic experts attempts to make sense of the tectonic shifts in Hong Kong’s media environment. > MORE
As the deluge of disinformation becomes a tsunami—creating real societal problems and stoking divisions—how do we combat it? Should government pass laws to regulate so-called “fake news”? This symposium on 7 July 2021 was organized by the HKU journalism centre in collaboration with CUHK and HKBU. > VIEW
pREVIOUS EVENTS
The 19th Chinese Internet Research Conference from 23–24 May is being hosted by the School. It will feature more than 40 scholars from around the world.> MORE
Communicating Multi-modally: Research & Expressive Culture is a pre-conference event of the International Communication Association Annual Conference in Paris in May 2022 . It is co-organised with three North American schools.> MORE
HKBU-affiliated faculty and students will have a significant presence at the International Communication Association’s Annual Conference in May 2022. For a full list of presenters, click here.
pREVIOUS TALKS
HKBU’s CMCR and CUHK’s C-Centre launched a new Chinese Journalism Studies Network to facilitate knowledge exchange and to foster collaborative research on Chinese journalism. A roundtable of established researchers reviewed the current status of the field and suggested new research directions that can illuminate media dynamics in China. > MORE
On Monday 17 July 2023, environmental journalists, scholars, and experts from the US, Europe, and Asia shared their views and experiences on reporting climate change and what are the challenges they are facing. > MORE
On Tuesday 6 June 2023, Xiaoming Fu elaborated on the dynamics of social computing as a representation of the interactions between computational methods and the human society, with several case studies, including anomaly detection, temporal-spatial data analysis, and consumer behavior analysis. > MORE
On Tuesday 23 May 2023, David Herold drew on his research experiences on the digital practices of Chinese people to discuss how and why ethnographers piece together a variety of data points from their original fieldwork, online contacts, media reports, interviews, and other methods to approach (theoretical) topics of interests. > MORE
On Thursday, 27 April 2023, Tianji Cai (Professor, University of Macau) discussed his web-based research project on the online sex market in Macau, which shows strong periodicity of sex worker touring.> MORE
On Wednesday, 26 April 2023, six scholars from the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University, China, shared the findings of their study, topic at the Research Seminar Series.> MORE
在4月21日(五)，吳飛(浙江大學教授)和方興東(浙江大學教授)，將分別從宏觀和微觀角度探討「數位共通」，及分析總結互聯網在中國式現代化進程中的關鍵角色和對世界的影響，並討論未來中國互聯網需以「80億人思維」推動全球化進程的圖景。> MORE
On Friday, 31 March 2023, Chin-Chuan Lee (Chair Professor, National Chengchi University, Taiwan) shared almost everything about his four-decade long academic career, with topics ranging from ties between personal interest and social issues, the global-historical nexus, development of intellectual taste and visions, cultivation of technical competence, to encounters with “giants” in the field, institution building, academic publishing, and supervision of doctoral students.> MORE
On Friday, 24 March 2023, Sibo Liu (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) shared the results of his study on the historical roots of Trumpism among the Chinese diaspora. Analysing the one million tweets posted by over 200 Chinese overseas opinion leaders from 2019 to early 2021, Liu finds that Chinese opinion leaders with strong authoritarian imprints are more likely to support Trump and endorse anti-democratic practices.> MORE
On Wednesday, 8 March 2023, Matthieu J. Guitton (Professor, Université Laval) and Bu Zhong (Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) discussed the following four topics: Public response to AI developments, AI and metaverse, Socially responsible AI, and the role of Computers in Human Behaviour: Artificial Humans (CHB: AH).> MORE
On Tuesday, 7 March 2023, Matthieu J. Guitton (Professor, Université Laval), talked about the challenges that scholarly journals’ editors are facing, and explore some of the strategies that can be used to help develop and promote journals, from the quality of the published material to the journal exposure and audience.> MORE
On Friday, 3 March 2023, Jos Bartels (Associate Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) discussed the roles of social media in affecting employee behaviors by providing a brief distinction between different approaches to explaining social media in organizations. He also highlighted the three topics current research and some challenging ideas for future research.> MORE
On Friday, 24 February 2023, Ying Zhu (Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) discussed the origins and evolutions of the American and Chinese film industries as it traces and tracks the ups and downs of Sino-Hollywood entanglement under the sway of the larger political, economic, and cultural forces, domestic and international. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, Zhu charted multiple power dynamics and teased out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications.> MORE
On Tuesday, 29 November, Rita Men (Professor, University of Florida) provided an overview of her research programs on internal communication, leadership communication and emerging technologies in public relations. She also discussed a few projects she’s currently working on related to corporate diversity communication, CEO activism, and digital privacy. > MORE
在11月25日(五)，肖小穗(香港浸會大學榮休教授)將探討分析從修辭學視角研究中國改革運動及近40年來的媒體改革的重要性。> MORE
On Friday, 4 November 2022, Lianjiang Li (Professor, Lingnan University, Hong Kong) shared candid tips for PhD students to help them navigate the exciting and challenging academic journey. He stressed that perseverance is one of the most essential qualities of a PhD student who needs to engage in scathing self-criticism and sustained self-editing.> MORE
On Friday, 28 October 2022, Guobin Yang (Professor, University of Pennsylvania) discussed the narrative strategies in his new book The Wuhan Lockdown and reflected on the meaning of academic research and scholarship in times of a public health crisis and global conflicts.> MORE
On Tuesday, 25 October 2022, Munmun De Choudhury (Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology) discussed the impact of social media on mental well-being by presenting critical evidence from a series of interlinked studies. She further highlighted the potential benefits and risks of social media use in relations to substance misuse disclosures and patients’ social reintegration efforts following a major psychiatric episode.> MORE
On Thursday, 20 October 2022, Richard Xu (Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) reviewed the recent history of community detection research, including the seminal research in stochastic block model and more complex work such as the Copula-based Mixture Membership Stochastic Block model. He also discussed how these models can help in a journalism setting.> MORE
On Wednesday, 12 October 2022, Fedor Dokshin (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto) talked about his study that uses the case of residential solar photovoltaics (PV) in New York State to (1) measure the partisan gap in solar adoption and (2) test whether more favorable economics of solar PV mute the effect of political identity.> MORE
On Wednesday, 5 October 2022, Dhavan Shah (Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison) examines the growing importance of computational social science in communication research. He argues that the turn toward data science is transforming the field through increased attention to digital trace data, electronic text and digital visual content, and network connections and communication interactions.> MORE
On Friday, 16 September 2022, Wayne Xu Weiai (Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst) shares findings of his project that explores Facebook-based state media accounts from various geopolitical players and focuses on three practices—content volume, intermedia agenda setting/following, and coordinated sharing through networks of Facebook pages, groups, and verified public profiles.> MORE
On Thursday, 12 May 2022, Jie Li (Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University) dives into her recent book Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era which traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China’s Mao era, reckoning with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations.> MORE
On Friday, 22 April 2022, Drew Margolin (Associate Professor, Cornell University) presents a “theory of informative fictions” which argue that false stories, while misleading about the objective world, can provide useful “character information”, which portrays the theory of mind of persons and groups.> MORE
In this symposium on 12 April, 12 leading international scholars presents analysis and case studies of everyday aesthetic interest and experience from different cultural settings in the East and the West. > MORE
On Friday, 8 April 2022, Romain Badouard (Associate Professor, Université Paris Panthéon-Assas) uses YouTube and Facebook to discuss the impact of automation of moderation and shadow banning, two specific aspects of the reform of their content moderation policies, on free speech online. > MORE
On Friday, 8 April 2022, Sai Wang (Research Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) focuses on the phenomenon of hostile online interactions and its impact on individuals’ psychological and behavioural responses and the implications of digital technologies for promoting respectful behaviours in online environments. > MORE
On Wednesday, 6 April 2022, scholars and experts from Hong Kong and Italy will discuss how AI and technology can be applied to cultural heritage and digital humanities. > MORE
On Friday, 1 April 2022, Lin Zhu (Visiting Scholar, Hong Kong Baptist University) introduces culture as a value framework and discusses its application in analyzing cases of public diplomacy, crisis communication, and social media influencer endorsements. > MORE
On Friday, 1 April 2022, Marina Hassapopoulou (Assistant Professor, New York University) aims to approach AI, automation, machine learning, and algorithmic culture from an Arts and Humanities-oriented perspective in order to propose a more interdisciplinary accompaniment to techno-scientific and corporate research. > MORE
On Wednesday, 30 March 2022, Cuihua Cindy Shen (Professor, University of California, Davis) introduces two categories of big data most relevant for communication scholars, content and digital footprints, and their characteristics and research implications, as well as recent trends and challenges of computational communication. > MORE
On Wednesday, 23 March 2022, Lei Guo (Associate Professor, Boston University), shares her recent work that examines the impact of mainstream and partisan media exposure on individuals’ political opinions and social media expression regarding an important and highly polarized issue in the United States: gun violence. > MORE
This book talk on 22 March 2022 features the editor and chapter authors of a new volume on racial harmony in Singapore.> MORE
On Friday, 18 March 2022, Andrew Gambino (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) explains how emergent socio-technological phenomena can be studied to advance our understanding of both technologies and our interpersonal relationships. > MORE
On Thursday, 10 March 2022, Amanda D. Lotz (Professor of Media Studies, Queensland University of Technology) explores key concepts and premises for investigating subscriber-funded streaming services and their role in culture. > MORE
On Thursday, 3 March 2022, Dana Polan (Professor of Cinema Studies, New York University) brings the film The Great Escape (1963) into conversation with cultural and intellectual history of the times.> MORE
On Tuesday, 1 March 2022, Colin Sparks (Emeritus Chair Professor of Media Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University) reports on the findings of a number of collaborative research projects on Chinese newspapers in the period 2011–2021 to which he was a contributor. There is strong evidence that the nature of, at least, newspaper journalism and journalists is undergoing a significant change. > MORE
On Friday, 25 February 2022, Xi Tian (Research Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) discusses how qualities of supportive messages and interactions influence people’s cognitive and emotional responses to adversity.> MORE
On Tuesday, 22 February 2022, Colin Sparks (Emeritus Chair Professor of Media Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University) reviews some of the most important contributions to the actualisation of de-westernizing media studies and asks why it has been so difficult to achieve such an obviously desirable goal.> MORE
On Tuesday, 15 February 2022, Colin Sparks (Emeritus Chair Professor of Media Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University) talks about what a thesis is and what it is not, particularly the importance of “originality” in most formal definitions of a successful submission, and the overall shape of the thesis and the constituent elements that together make up a satisfactory submission.> MORE
On Tuesday, 8 February 2022, Colin Sparks (Emeritus Chair Professor of Media Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University) gives advice to research post-graduate students, or any other concerned scholar, on how to develop their original ideas into publishable articles. > MORE
On Friday 28 January, Weiyu Zhang (Associate Professor, National University of Singapore) discusses the concepts, theories and general history of civic tech research, and introduces three cases of civic tech development in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. .> MORE
On Monday 29 November, Xinzhi Zhang (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) shares his research project which explores the possibility of establishing constructive and deliberative public communication among different social groups from a socio-psychological perspective.> MORE
On Friday 26 November, Colin Sparks (Emeritus Chair Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) discusses various ways of undertaking comparative studies and review the strengths and weaknesses of some of the most impressive contemporary examples. > MORE
On Friday 26 November, Keonyoung Park (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University) examines the way corporate social advocacy (CSA) generates brand loyalty. She will introduce two studies focusing on different mediators (i.e., social media community engagement, CSR scepticism) on the relationship between CSA and brand loyalty. > MORE
Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University) presented empirical examples ranging from corporate enterprises to simulated long duration space exploration to demonstrate how we can leverage people analytics–and in particular relational analytics—to mine “digital exhaust”—data created by individuals every day in their digital transactions. > MORE
Elina R. Tachkova (Department of Communication Studies) discussed about crises that emerge when organizations violate stakeholder expectations and place both stakeholders and the organization at risk of harm. Most crises are more regular than extreme in nature, but organizations often are entangled in extreme crises. > MORE
Shuhua Zhou (Missouri School of Journalism) examines the affordances provided by print newspapers and digital news sites based on the perspectives of Gibson’s ecological psychology and his conceptualizations of affordances. > MORE
Colin Sparks calls for a reflexive approach to making theoretical choices. He reviews the supposed opposition between social scientific and humanities inspired research; between administrative and critical research; and the claims of different methodological approaches to data and evidence. > MORE
Damian Tambini discusses his new book, Media Freedom. This lecture on 15 October looks at the history and emergence of two key theories of media freedom, focusing on the US and the UK, and argues that media freedom should be a core value that shapes media systems but that it needs to be fundamentally redefined. > MORE
On Friday 29 October, Kenny K. K. Ng (Academy of Film) discussed his latest book, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-link in Politics, Art, and Tradition. After 1949, Hong Kong Cinema became an ideological battleground. This talk highlighted controversial cases involving Hollywood, British, and Chinese-language film productions. > MORE
In her book talk on Thursday 17 June, 7pm, Dorothy Lau introduced her new monograph, Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Networks: Voice, Ethnicity, Power, offering an exposition of the methodological shift from the visual-based to aural-based vectors of studying Chinese stars and reimagining Chineseness. > MORE