Shenzhen names an inherited condition. Simultaneously geopolitical and inter-cultural, innovative and oppressive, adaptable, whimsical, provisional, and scary global in its pretensions and reach, Shenzhen follows on piracy, colonial expansion, international socialism, the rise of the East Asian Tigers, the Cold War, and the era of Reform and Opening. Shenzhen is also excruciatingly banal, suffusing everyday life and ordinary minds with a sense that suddenly, abruptly, and even unexpectedly we’re all living intercultural lives, but not the same intercultural lives, and certainly not with the same values, or if with the same values not exactly with the same valuation of those values. This talk thinks about how we’ve been blindsided by globalization.

Mary Ann O'Donnell is an independent artist-ethnographer and co-founder of the Handshake 302 Art Space in Baishizhou, Shenzhen’s most iconic urban village. Her blog, “Shenzhen Noted” (formerly “Shenzhen Fieldnotes”) has chronicled the city’s transformation through photography, notes, translation, and occasional essays since 2005. As an independent public intellectual, O’Donnell contributes to projects that make legible the scale, history, and theoretical implications of urbanization in Shenzhen. As a curator, she develops projects that redefine urban possibility through creative engagement with informal urbanization.