Unconscious Encounters: Digital Dreaming & Group Dynamics

For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00pm on Oct. 20 for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event. NOTE: You cannot access campus using the QR code from Eventbrite.

Full Talk Title: 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.

Host or Publisher Weatherhead East Asian Institute