Abstract:
With smog now constituting part of the daily health threats for Chinese people, many pollution tracking APPs have come into the market to meet the demand for smog related information. Taking one particular APP- “BlueSky Map”, which is originally known as Pollution Map, as the focal case, this talk will explore how grassroots activists define, legitimize and employ such APPs as useful tools, which enable the general public to get informed, make their voices heard, and take necessary actions. The empirical analysis will focus on how environmental APPs empower Chinese public, how do citizens, NGOs, government and polluters interact on the interface, and what is the effect and implication of such participation for China’s environmental governance.

Short bio:
Dr. Hongtao Li (李红涛) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism & Communication and a Distinguished Young Scholar at Zhejiang University. He also serves as an Associate Professor (20%) in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. in Communication from City University of Hong Kong in February 2010. Before joining Zhejiang University in May 2010, he was a post-doctoral fellow and later a visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for Communication Research at City U of Hong Kong. His research interests include air pollution and environmental politics, global communication, sociology of news, media and cultural memory. He has published a book on the mediated memory of Nanjing Massacre (Renmin University Press, 2017) and his work appears regularly on major English and Chinese journals, including The China Quarterly, Communication and the Public, Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Press/Politics, Asian Journal of Communication, Chinese Journal of Communication, and Communication & Society (in Chinese), etc.
(Source: Personal Homepage, Zhejiang University)