Global Markets in Local Color (World Heritage Yard Sales)

Assistant Professor Sarah Lewison, Department of Radio-Television, College of Mass Communication & Media Arts, SIUC

Monday, February 14th - 1:00 p.m.
Communications Building Room 1032

Sarah Lewison lived for six months in 2008 in a small village in northwest Yunnan, China - the ancestral home of the Naxi people, who are one of the 56 ethnic minorities recognized by the People’s Republic of China. In her presentation, Lewison will describe the Naxi culture and discuss the lived reality of the Naxi, who are beset with the same contradictions and challenges facing many indigenous populations in the outer peripheries of development.

Lewison will focus on the contradictions faced by the Naxi through representations made of them by tourism industries, contrasting the common commercial tourism vernacular with approaches used by NGOs interested in land conservation and finally with a Naxi-owned ecotourism business. Lewison will also speculatively connect these representation strategies to an international tendency toward heritage commodification and management that operates in alignment with incursions of neoliberal privatization.

Assistant Professor Sarah Lewison is a producer, artist, and writer whose work examines power, economics, and political subjectivity. Lewison’s research about media aesthetics, social history, sustainability, and culture has been published internationally. She holds an MFA from the University of California-San Diego.

FREE EVENT – OPEN TO ALL. Contact Laura Germann at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 618-453-6876 for more information.