Unconscious Encounters: Digital Dreaming and Group Dynamics Across China and North America

Speakers: 

Samuele Collu, Assistant Professor, Medical and Psychological Anthropologist, McGill University

Nick Bartlett, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinse Culture and Society, AMEC/EALAC, Columbia University

Moderator: 

Ying Qian, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University

Samuele Collu will discuss his ongoing research on the phenomenology of scrolling through TikTok, which reveals algorithmic feeds functioning as externalized dream sequences that modulate the user’s unconscious life. Nick Bartlett will then speak about his work in Group Relations Conferences (GRCs) in China, exploring how moving participants between disorienting here-and-now group sessions and containing then-and-there reflective spaces produces a contested form of “not-me” speech. The authors will then discuss resonances in their efforts to attend to the unconscious, unsettling familiar boundaries between internal and external psychic life, in a time of globally mediated encounters.

Speaker’s Bio: Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research addresses the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices. His first book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2026). Collu is currently working on Dreams I Scroll Through, a book manuscript that draws from multimodal ethnographic research to explore the affective experience of binge-scrolling on social media.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Registration:

• To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
• To attend this event online, please register HERE.