Weixian Pan

Weixian Pan

Assistant Professor

Film and Media

weixian.pan@queensu.ca

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Weixian Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen鈥檚 University. She holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. Prior to joining Queen鈥檚 University, she was Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai and affiliated faculty in the . She also taught at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and worked as the coordinator and researcher in the .

Her research interests center on politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines these textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through the situated experience of China but gradually expanding to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia and the Global South. Her work appeared in peer-review journals such as Asiascape: Digital Asia, Culture Machine, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Environmental Media. In the past, she has led curatorial projects such as 鈥溾 (2021) and 鈥淐hina Now: Independent Visions鈥 (2016).

Her current book project Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China鈥檚 Borderlands, examines how China鈥檚 geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making, between the mid-twentieth century and the present day. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrates natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower and maritime signal sovereignty.

She is currently working on a collaborative video project on the hydraulic and infrastructural landscapes along the Pearl River in Southern China. Her next research aims to theorize the transboundary linkages of Asia through different forms of aquatic mediation, such as vernacular imagination of water and the emerging blue carbon economy.

Selected Publications:

  • 鈥淐rash Landing on the Philippines: Transnational Korean Dramas and Internet Infrastructure Desires鈥 (Under review with Television and New Media)
  • 鈥淭eaching with Video: A Global Media Form and Interfaces of Global Encounters,鈥 Teaching Dossier on . Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter 2022)
  • 鈥淏itcoin鈥檚 Ethnic Shadow and Echoes.鈥 Art Review of Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, by Liu Chuang. Journal for Environmental Media 2, no. 2, 2021.
  • 鈥.鈥 Culture Machine 19, 2020. (Special issue on 鈥淢edia Populism鈥)
  • 鈥淯nder the Dome: Un-engineering Digital Capture in China鈥檚 Smog.鈥 In Asiascape: Digital Asia 4, no. 1-2, 2017.