This roundtable brings together multidisciplinary scholars from media and film studies, design, and visual culture to explore modernity in China during the 1950s and 1960s through the lens of material production and spatial transformation. Centered on the intensification of productivity in industry and land use, the discussion considers how object-making and space-making—from everyday domestic goods to large-scale infrastructural projects—reshaped daily life, cultural practices, and social relations under socialism, and why these questions remain urgent today.

The panel features Ying Qian (Columbia University), whose research on Mao-era documentary films, especially of dam and infrastructure projects, examines how time, space, and the body were reorganized through socialist experiments; Jennifer Altehenger (University of Oxford), author of Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, who brings a material history perspective on industrialization, scarcity, and the tensions between ideology and everyday life; and Weixian Pan (Queen’s University), who draws on her book project Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands to analyze how visual culture has shaped the making of China’s frontiers from the mid-twentieth century to today.

This event takes place in conjunction with our current exhibition, How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979, and is organized in collaboration with the Global Emergent Media Lab (GEM Lab), a research platform based at Concordia University and centred on the critical study of global new media.

This event will be held in English and is free.

As space is limited, registration is recommended.

If the activity you are interested in is full, do not hesitate to arrive ten minutes in advance to register on a waiting list. It is possible that places will become free before the beginning of the activity.