Unmanned and unwomaned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, are breaking and creating new boundaries of image-based communication. Using social network analysis and critical discourse analysis, we examine the 60 most popular question threads about drones on Zhihu, China’s largest social question answering platform. We trace how controversial issues around these supposedly novel tech products are mediated, domesticated, visualized, or marginalized via digital representational technology. Supported by Zhihu’s topic categorization algorithm, drone-related discussions form topic clusters. These topic clusters gain currency in the government-regulated cyberspace, where their meanings remain open to widely divergent interpretations and mediation by various agents. We find that the largest drone company DJI occupies a central and strongly interconnected position in the discussions. Drones are, moreover, represented as objects of consumption, technological advancement, national future, and uncertainty. At the same time, the sense-making process of drone-related discussions evokes emerging sets of narrative user identities with potential political effects. Users engage in digital representational technologies publicly and collectively to raise questions and represent their views on new technologies. Therefore, we argue that platforms like Zhihu are essential when studying views of the Chinese citizenry towards technological developments.

Identities are not pre-given but are socially constructed with performative power. Taking a critical discursive approach, this study explores how the cultural understandings of deafness and the deaf community become intertwined with ideas of the ‘state-home’ (guo jia) in contemporary China. The paper analyzes forty award-winning biographical essays written by Chinese citizens with hearing disabilities in a 2016 national essay contest. The paper argues that the paradigmatic narratives from the essay contest correspond to the disability policy framework of the Chinese government in the market-reform era. The implications of these statist narratives of deaf identity need to be critically reflected as the human body becomes a central site of governance and governmentality in China during this stage.

Curb-cuts by the streets, subway elevators, automatic door openers in buses and buildings—Bess Williamson’s Accessible America wonderfully unpacks the sociopolitical histories of designs that are now ubiquitous in the contemporary American society. The conception of the built environment as filled with physical barriers that can be removed through proactive design interventions, as Williamson argues, is a new consciousness emerging in the aftermath of the Second World War when myriad soldiers returned to the United States. Injured and newly disabled veterans’ demand for prostheses and accommodations in the built environment presented the immediacy of the issue to many stakeholders—military hospitals, prosthesis experts and manufacturers, state officials, and disabled veterans themselves.