Hello You!
Welcome back to the Earth Sea Love Podcast.
We had a little break there as we had technical difficulties.
Nah! I was on retreat communing with nature and needed a rest.
We brought you some powerful stuff in our last three episode of the new series called Practicing Creative Fugitivity which are conversations in response to the book Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu. These conversations are part of a project called Practicing Creative Fugitivity which has been funded by Arts Council Funding.
So we return with our next episode in the series with Cheer. Lijiaozi Cheng.
Dr. Cheer Cheng is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work has moved across media,
literature, sociology, health and technology. It was really good to get to know Cheer deeper through this conversation.
In this episode we talk about:
* Being part of community
* Being fugitive
* Chinese heritage
* Running away alone and together
* Black Feminism
* Home towns and nostalgia
* Homeplace for black and brown women
* Getting out into nature for healing
* Studying for a PhD and burn out
* Having the headspace to write
* Academic dreams
* Being ‘othered’
* Playing the accepted roles to settle into society
* Childhood and trying to fit in
* Being ungendered
* Chinese work culture of 996
* Fugitivity is a journey, a process, an attitude
Bio: Cheer Cheng is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work has moved across media,
literature, sociology, health and technology. She is still trying to figure out what exactly she is doing. She has researched suboptimal health - the uncertain space between health and illness, media campaigns targeting ethnic minoritised communities around vaccination and participation in medical research, cultural inclusion within a university, and technologies in everyday life with dementia. A thread running through much of this work is an interest in how different forms of knowledge and lived experience encounter one another, within health and care but also in everyday life. For now, she is still floating between these things, exploring her academic identity and her identity more generally.
She currently works at Queen Mary University of London on public involvement and
engagement, health data and research governance within Parkinson’s research.
Alongside this work, Cheer collaborates with artists and technologists on creative projects exploring AI, memory and human–technology relations. Her recent collaborations include interactive AI artworks and generative film, bringing sociological questions into conversation with new media and speculative creative practices. She is also slightly troubled by - and perhaps slightly guilty about - her own engagement with AI. Much of what draws her attention sits somewhere in between: categories that don’t quite hold, forms of knowledge that don’t easily fit together, and relationships between human and non- human worlds. She is interested in what becomes possible when we stay with these uncertain spaces rather than trying too quickly to resolve them. Among all this indecisiveness, she loves cats. That might be the most stable part of her identity.
The music used throughout this series is free music from Ketsa.uk
This track is Never Heard BY KETSA
This series is funded by Arts Council England
