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Volume 8, Issue 2-3
  • ISSN: 2051-7041
  • E-ISSN: 2051-705X
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Abstract

The world during the COVID-19 pandemic became more divided than united, both between states and among individuals. Opinions are polarized partly because, as I have observed in urban China, the public is simultaneously preoccupied by the very near (the self) and the very far (the imagined ‘world’), but neglect the space in between, and as a result fail to recognize how the social world is concretely constituted through interconnected differences. This article advocates a way of perceiving the world by taking ‘the nearby’ ( in Chinese) as a central scope. The nearby is a lived space where one encounters people with diverse backgrounds on a regular basis. The nearby brings different positions into one view, thus constituting a ‘scope’ of seeing. Such a scope enables nuanced understandings of reality and facilitates new social relations and actions. The nearby could form a line of resistance against the power of the state, capital and technology, that is turning local communities into units of administrative control and value extraction. This article calls for a ‘First Mile Movement’, in which artists, researchers and activists work together to help facilitate citizens with the construction of their nearby as a basis for reflecting upon life experiences, testing grand ideologies and engaging in public discussion.

© 2021 The Author. Published by Intellect Limited.
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC), which allows users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article, as long as the author is attributed and the article is not used for commercial purposes. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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2021-11-01
2025-10-01
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/content/journals/10.1386/jcca_00042_1
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The nearby: A scope of seeing
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, 147 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1386/jcca_00042_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jcca_00042_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jcca_00042_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): city; First Mile Movement; neighbourhood; scope; seeing; the nearby

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