University of Nottingham Malaysia
University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute-Malaysia (UoNARI-M)
     
  

Sipping Tea, Performing Plastic: Representational and Materialist Politics of Boba Tea Consumption

Date(s)
6th December 2021
Contact
For more information on this event and register to obtain the Zoom link, kindly e-mail uonari@nottingham.edu.my.
Description
University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute-Malaysia Webinar 

This talk focuses on the under-discussed non-human actor – the plastic in the process of boba tea consumption. It tracks the ways the plastic cup is represented and functioned in boba tea advertising. Is the plastic cup merely a physical and impartial container in contemporary food and beverage industry? How does plastic play a role in the visualisation and mass mediation of food content? This essay uses recent discussions of new materialism to bring together cultural analysis of the boba tea consumption phenomenon that could be relevant for reflecting a sustainable future.  It examines how plastic plays a new and active role in changing the daily habits and new meanings of food and beverage in society.

Details
Date:
6 December 2021, Monday
Time: 20:00 to 21:30 (GMT +8) 
Location: Online via Zoom 

About the speaker: 
Professor Ka-Ming Wu is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she has taken up ethnographic research to examine the cultural politics of state and society, waste, and most recently, gender and nationalism in contemporary China. Her first book is Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism (UIP 2015). Her second book Feiping Shenghuo: Lajichang De Jingji, Shequn Yu Kongjian (CUHK 2016) (Living with Waste: Economies, Communities and Spaces of Waste Collectors in China) discusses the socio-cultural impacts of waste. Her academic papers have been published in many journals such as Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theories, The China Journal, Urban Geography, and China Perspectives.

University of Nottingham Malaysia

Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih
Selangor Darul Ehsan
Malaysia

telephone: +603 8924 8000
fax: +603 8924 8001
email: enquiries@nottingham.edu.my