By A Bookselling Research Network Symposium
Date & Time: May 26, 2023 02:00 PM London
Zoom Meeting: https://bangor-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/98327456202 (Meeting ID: 969 7521 0663)
This talk considers the place and importance of books in Chinese society and in the cultural life of the people. Our research gives new insights so that we can have a better understanding of the relationship between books and what has become known as common prosperity in mainland China. This, in turn, feeds into wider societal concerns as it raises questions about the place and purpose of bookstores within the broader social culture. The growth and development of the Chinese book trade will be covered but whereas other studies base their findings on data taken from sales and finance our focus is on official government publications to give a fresh perspective on the apparent expansion and development of physical bookstores in mainland China. How does an examination of the government policy regarding booksellers, as set out in the Five-Year Plans and the Laws of the People’s Republic of China, help us to understand the importance of literacy and culture in the wider Chinese society?
Simon Mahony is Professor of Digital Humanities, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Information Management, Peking University. His research focus is digital humanities with specific interests in education, information studies, equality, diversity, inclusion, and the open agenda.
This talk explores sidewalk bookselling in New York City as a dynamic space and practice for redrawing cultural, social, and legal boundaries of belonging for the bookseller and their customer-readers. Sidewalk booksellers everywhere must erect their tables on the unstable and shifting space of the sidewalk as regulated and politicized public and social space. In New York City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, while sidewalk booksellers benefited from First Amendment exemptions for vending print material, municipal space management strategies continued to circumscribe and contain street bookselling. Within this tension, New York City’s sidewalk booksellers crafted geographies of belonging through diverse strategies of evading regulatory enforcement and cultivating intellectual and social exchange. Using the liminal and contested space of the sidewalk not only to make a living but also to create an inclusive space that incorporates the book and bookselling into the dynamics of urban social exchange, New York City’s sidewalk booksellers assert the value of books on streets.
Kristen Highland is Assistant Professor of English at American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Her research focuses on book history and the material dimensions of literary culture, including the social and cultural life of American bookstores, as well as digital humanities and mapping. She has recently published 
