Conference Grant Reports: Zina Wang at MLA 2025

We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Zina Wang presented on the ceremonial destruction of epidemic-related personal data at the 2025 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in New Orleans. From Zina:

I participated in the MLA 2025 conference panel titled "Digital Labor and Cultural Production in East Asia," held on January 9, 2025, in New Orleans. Organized by Professor Carlos Rojas from Duke University, the panel featured scholars from diverse backgrounds discussing how digital technologies reshape labor, aesthetics, and cultural identities in East Asian contexts.

My own presentation, titled "The Funeral of Big Data: Labor and Amnesia," examined the ceremonial destruction of epidemic-related personal data in Wuxi, China. I analyzed how this highly publicized data deletion paradoxically served both to reinforce and to disguise the logic of digital governance and its capitalist underpinnings. Drawing upon critical theories of technology from Marx, Heidegger, and Stiegler, my presentation argued that data destruction ceremonies, while framed as progressive acts of legal and ethical responsibility, are deeply embedded in broader processes of digital capitalism's self-reproduction, ultimately serving as spectacles that conceal ongoing surveillance and control.

The other panelists brought complementary perspectives on the complexities of digital labor and representation. Professor Viren Murthy explored Japan's digital labor practices, focusing on the intersections between care work, digital technology, and capitalism, critiquing the assumption that technology could easily replace human labor or free people from traditional work relations. Renren Yang from the University of British Columbia presented an intriguing analysis of livestreamed web novel creation in China, highlighting how these practices blur lines between entertainment and exploitation, creating new pressures and labor dynamics for authors who produce creative content in real-time under audience supervision. Zachary Gottesman of UC Irvine addressed how the animation series "Avatar: The Last Airbender" constructs multiple contested versions of "Asianness," showing the intricate layers of cultural labor involving American perceptions, Korean animation industries, and transnational aesthetic negotiations.

Participating in this panel greatly enriched my understanding of digital labor's complex entanglements with culture, capital, and identity across East Asia. The dialogue between panelists and attendees further clarified the theoretical stakes of digital media scholarship, especially regarding how technologies of representation and surveillance intersect with broader cultural and economic processes.