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A few days into the quarantines that ushered in the Year of the Rat, printed QR codes began to appear everywhere in Shanghai. This was the beginning of a QR code health registration scheme, which was used to manage population during the Coronavirus pandemic. Register and you were given a coloured QR code. A green code meant access to the city was open, with a red code the metropolis was locked. Ubiquitous QR codes are not new to China's urban landscape. Starting around 2015 these simple black and white images, complex enough to encode characters, but cheap and easy to produce, created a virtual economy based on mobile-payments that has totally transformed city life. More than texting or talking, watching, listening or wayfinding, today, in China at least, QR codes are the cell phone's killer app. This essay explores the machinic assemblage of cell phones + QR Codes which opens a portal into an emerging mediasphere that is fundamentally non-anthropomorphic in nature. Scanning a QR code is an embodied practice or sensing system that activates an all-pervasive locative media, transforming the previously inert physical landscape into the urban scale, distributed intelligence of the sentient city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores our increasingly intimate engagement with the electromagnetic spectrum. It does so by focusing on technology's wireless wave, from radio and telegraphy to the mobile phone (a device that has been adopted throughout the planet faster than has any technology in history), as well as the rise of smart objects, wearables and the Internet of Things. It shows how these technologies communicate in frequencies whose range is beyond our perceptual reach, arguing that the technological revelation of the imperceptible waves within which we are immersed is critical to the futurism at the heart of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conversation between philosopher of digital cultures Anna Greenspan and historian of China Jeffrey Wasserstrom, speculative-fiction writer Anil Menon, and historian of science Kavita Philip, exploring the emerging work from scholars who have grown up with the global influence of science fiction in popular culture while being trained in the disciplinary spaces between science, engineering, social science, law and the humanities. The following questions are addressed: what are the prehistories of science fiction and the futures of such interdisciplinary work? How do India and China, as places where important new science fiction is being written, and as nations exploding now into emerging markets characterized by technological dynamism, fit into older historiographic frames that saw the European Enlightenment as the source of modern science, and the 'developing world' as destined only to ever play catch-up? How should the politics of digital futures and non-European pasts figure in historical research and in fiction writing, keeping in mind the historian's fear of presentism and anachronism, and the fiction writer's dislike of political moralism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conversation between philosopher of digital cultures Anna Greenspan and historian of China Jeffrey Wasserstrom, speculative-fiction writer Anil Menon, and historian of science Kavita Philip, exploring the emerging work from scholars who have grown up with the global influence of science fiction in popular culture while being trained in the disciplinary spaces between science, engineering, social science, law and the humanities. The following questions are addressed: what are the prehistories of science fiction and the futures of such interdisciplinary work? How do India and China, as places where important new science fiction is being written, and as nations exploding now into emerging markets characterized by technological dynamism, fit into older historiographic frames that saw the European Enlightenment as the source of modern science, and the 'developing world' as destined only to ever play catch-up? How should the politics of digital futures and non-European pasts figure in historical research and in fiction writing, keeping in mind the historian's fear of presentism and anachronism, and the fiction writer's dislike of political moralism?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative research documents the educational strategies of international migrants to Shanghai who are attempting to raise their children as cosmopolitans through immersion in local Chinese schools. We distinguish this localizing educational strategy from the established network of international schools designed to serve the families of corporate expatriates. Instead, our research subjects consist of self-initiated expatriates, or 'middling transnationals', who have chosen to prioritize immersion in the language and culture of China by sending their children to local schools. This localized, or Sinocentric, model exposes non-Chinese children to a challenging and nationalistic Chinese curriculum. Our analysis of these practices as a form of cosmopolitan education challenges both the goal of teaching a universal and placeless ethical cosmopolitanism and the assumption that a meaningful cosmopolitan education must take place in the idealized setting of a liberal cosmopolitan school system. We also highlight the difficulties families face in this approach, describing this as an 'entangled cosmopolitanism', an enriching but uncomfortable engagement with both local and home-country educational cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]