Today I welcome Professor Bin (HSU) Xu to discuss COVID-19 and the legacy of the Sichuan Earthquake in China, alongside cultures of mourning around the world today.
Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association, and Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China (Cambridge, forthcoming in 2021). His articles have appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals. He is working on his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press, UK) and two ongoing projects pertaining to mourning, commemorations, and symbolic politics of the COVID-19 crisis.