Director of the annual Summer School in the Department of Media and Communication

Marco Pellitteri is a cultural- and media sociologist. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Suzhou, China). His research spans several sectors of media and social studies: television and broadcasting, animation, comics, video games, soft power and popular culture in Asia. He is the author of several monographs, among which The Dragon and the Dazzle (Tunué with the Japan Foundation, 2010, 750 pages, It. ed. 2008) and Mazinga Nostalgia (1999, 2002, 2008; 4^th revised edition Tunué, 2018, 2 vols, 1600 pages); and the editor, with Wong Heung Wah, of Japanese Animation in Asia: Transnational Industry and Success (Routledge, 2021). He has published in academic journals such as Asian Journal of Communication, Kritika Kultura, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Arts, Yuriika, Mechademia, Belphégor, Cabiria, and others. He obtained his doctorate in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento (Italy).

This keynote speech will be both a general discourse on higher education in the fields of media and communication in hybrid teaching/learning environments and a personal critical account of the speaker’s teaching practice in the areas of communication, media, visual design, advertising, research methodology, and the cultural and creative industries in the four latest years (2018-2021). The transition from face-to-face didactics to on-line classes in February 2019 due to the Covid-19 viral outbreak first in China and then around the world, and later on to so-called ‘hybrid’ teaching—where on-site and off-site students co-exist in what has been labelled ‘the blended classroom’—have entailed a variety of challenges and rearrangements for academics, students, and universities at large. The speech, based on direct observations and a critical take on the speaker’s personal experience, offers a perspective on this new and evolving situation in China.