Pictured above: The 2023-24 class. Students came from the School of Communication, School of Creative Art, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
From January 2025, I will be teaching COMM7220: Freedom of Expression & Censorship on Fridays 9:30am–12:20pm starting on 17 January in the CVA Building, 5 Hereford Road, Kowloon Tong. Do consider enrolling if you are in a university in Hong Kong and:
- you are a research post-graduate student in any social science or humanities field;
- you are interested in exploring the ways media/communication is regulated around the world and how regulation is resisted;
- you want a seminar-style class in which your research ideas are workshopped step by step, with individual guidance to help you write a term paper that feeds into your dissertation research and/or can be turned into a publication.
- you can attend the class at the above time.
The course will examine not only direct and brutal repression, but also the trend toward indirect soft-authoritarian control, including self-censorship and algorithmic censorship. In addition to the roles of the state and the market, the seminar will consider how illiberal popular movements deny freedom for the thoughts they hate. It will also examine the impact of internet intermediaries.
It will compare competing norms of freedom of expression, including US First Amendment doctrine, international human rights law, and more traditional approaches. Theoretical insights will be gleaned from multiple fields including comparative politics, political sociology, critical theory, legal studies and internet studies. Students will thus attempt to enrich their own and the communication field’s conceptual understanding of censorship — including (re)defining what it actually means.
Assignments are designed to help students connect the course content with their own research interests in media/journalism/internet studies, film/cultural studies, comparative politics, political sociology, legal/policy studies, and so on. Here are some examples of term papers that my students chose to work on in previous rounds of the course:
“Collective Memory of the COVID-19 pandemic and Censorship in China”
“Conform or Confront: How Journalists Respond to Rising Authoritarianism”
“Weibo’s Community Council: Crowdsourced Censorship as a New Strategy?”
“Censoring Femme Fatale: Tang Wei and Clara Smith Hamon”
“Censorship of Animated Films: A Comparative Study of China, the United
States and Japan”
“Do Creative Industries Need Freedom of Expression? The Case of the Global Game Industry”
“Market Censorship: Corporate Impacts on Journalism in China”
Drop me an email if you have questions.