Power and People

In this talk, I explore the rise of Gen Z‑led protest movements in Kenya and how young people have used digital tools to push for political change. Drawing on interviews with youth organisers, I show how activists use social media to coordinate protests, attract public attention, and put pressure on political and corporate leaders.

The talk addresses three key questions: how these protests were organised, what political changes they produced, and what happened to the movements after the initial wave of mobilisation ended.
By examining youth‑led activism in Kenya, the research highlights how digitally driven mobilisation can rapidly shape political debates, even in the face of strong institutional barriers. The findings offer insights into the growing wave of Gen Z‑led protests across Africa and their implications for democratic change on the continent.

This talk explores how English literary works by Chinese diaspora writers and their translations transmit and (re)construct memories of the Nanjing Massacre across Anglophone and Chinese contexts. The Nanjing Massacre, which occurred during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and where over 300,000 Chinese people died, continues to have a lasting influence on both Chinese society and East Asia. The number of survivors has decreased to 21 as of today. To investigate how this traumatic past is represented and remembered, and the roles that diasporic literary works and their translations play in the memory formation of the Nanjing Massacre, my research conducts a comparative textual analysis of three fictions by Chinese American authors: Shouhua Qi’s When the Purple Mountain Burns (2005), Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem (2011), and Hong Zheng’s Nanjing Never Cries (2016), alongside their translations from English into Chinese. Through examining the narrative, exophonic, and translation strategies employed in the source and target texts, I argue that the works of Chinese diasporic authors on the Nanjing Massacre in an exophonic context, and the translations of their exophonic writing, serve as dual conduits for shaping transcultural memory of the Nanjing Massacre within the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds.