Description

This is the second virtual roundtable discussion for the new series – Theory/Praxis/Politics. This forum highlights film practitioners and programmers’ thoughts and reflections on the practices of censorship across Asia. Join our panelists, Sudarat Musikawong, Raymond Phathanavirangoon, and Thaiddhi, as they articulate their first-hand experiences in the field and unfurl the complexities of censorship both in the production and circulation of cinema.

Theory/Praxis/Politics is a webinar series working to advocate for and bring together perspectives of academics, filmmakers, programmers, civil servants, and other stakeholders with an interest in the question of censorship across Asia and its diasporas. We consider Asia as a productive site in which theory, practice, and politics overlap. The intersection allows us to question not only our understanding of censorship and the ways in which we engage with cinema in the region but also to reconsider the relationship between theory, aesthetics, and politics.

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RAYMOND PHATHANAVIRANGOON is a film producer and Executive Director of Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab (SEAFIC). Previously he was programmer or delegate for Toronto International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival and Cannes Critics’ Week. Prior, he was Director of Marketing & Special Projects (Acquisitions) for sales agent Fortissimo Films. His producing credits include Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s SAMUI SONG (Venice 2017) and HEADSHOT (Berlin 2012), Boo Junfeng’s APPRENTICE (Cannes 2016), Josh Kim’s HOW TO WIN AT CHECKERS (EVERY TIME) (Berlin 2015), Pang Ho-Cheung’s DREAM HOME (Tribeca 2010) and ABERDEEN (Hong Kong Film Awards Best Picture nominee 2014), the upcoming THIRTEEN LIVES by Ron Howard, among others.

SUDARAT MUSIKAWONG is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Population and Social Research at Mahidol University in Thailand. She received her Ph.D. and MA in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She positions her investigations within cultural-political sociology and ethnographic research. Her publications include with Malinee Khumsupa, “Notes on Camp Films in Authoritarian Thailand,” Southeast Asia Research Journal (2019)Her publications include “Gendered Casualties: Thai Memoirs in Activism,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (2013); “Mourning State Celebrations: Amnesic Iterations of Political Violence in Thailand,” in Identities, Global Studies in Culture and Power (2010); “Between Celebration and Mourning,” in Toward a Sociology of the Trace, (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); “Art for October Thai Cold War State Violence in Trauma Art,” positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2010.

THAIDDHI is a Filmmaker, Producer, and also Film Programmer. He studies Filmmaking at FAMU in the Czech Republic for 3 years master’s degree program in Cinema and Digital Media. His first short film “Awake” won Best Short Film at FAMU Fest 2009. He co-founded Wathann Film Festival in 2011 and worked as a Programmer for the festival. In 2013 he founded Third Floor Film Production to produce Myanmar Independent short films and documentary films. He produced a short film Cobalt Blue (2019) by Aung Phyoe which was selected for the Pardi di Domani International Competition at 72nd Locarno Film Festival. He also worked as a Cinematographer in the recent film Money Has Four Legs (2020) by Maung Sun, which was premiered at New Currents (Busan International Film Festival 2020).

Description

BOOK TALK

Stitching the 24-Hour City: Life, Labor, and the Problem of Speed in Seoul (Cornell University Press, 2021)

Stitching the 24-Hour City reveals the intense speed of garment production and everyday life in Dongdaemun, a lively market in Seoul, South Korea. Once the site of uprisings against oppressive working conditions in the 1970s and 80s, Dongdaemun has now become iconic for its creative economy, nightlife, and fast-fashion factories, and shopping plazas. Seo Young Park follows the work of people who witnessed and experienced the rapidly changing marketplace from the inside. Through this approach, Park examines the meanings and politics of work, focusing on what it takes for people to enable speedy production and circulation and also how they incorporate the critique of speed in the ways they make sense of their own work. Stitching the 24-Hour City provides in-depth ethnographic accounts of the garment designers, workers, and traders who sustain the extraordinary speed of fast fashion production and circulation, as well as the labor activists who challenge it. Attending to their narratives and practices of work, Park illuminates how speed is, rather than a singular drive of acceleration, an entanglement of uneven paces and cycles of life, labor, the market, and the city itself.

Learn more about the book at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501756115/stitching-the-24-hour-city/#bookTabs=1
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Seo Young Park is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College and works on the ethnographic approaches to urban environment, labor, and gender in South Korea. Her writings appeared in Journal of Korean Studies and edited volumes. She is currently working on the public anxiety on air quality issues, and gendered platform labor in Korea.

Description

Drawing on the famine records from late nineteenth century Punjab and North Western Provinces, this talk will contextualise the practices on famine public works construction within the trajectories of caste, gender and labour in South Asia. On famine public works, labourers, including a large number of women, worked in the construction of railways, roads, canals, and tanks in return for a subsistence wage. We will demonstrate that a relational definition of labour was central to the construction of caste respectability on famine works, thus opening up new ways to understand the relationship between caste, property and labour. Answering the question of who worked where and why, the talk will also show that women’s labour was constitutive of caste, and not merely its marker.

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Madhavi Jha is a postdoctoral fellow at Centre for South Asian Civilizations, Department of Historical Studies. Based on her PhD research, she is currently working on a book manuscript titled Women at Work: Women Labourers and Public Works Construction in Colonial India. Departing from the usual histories of construction work which present masculine experiences, this book offers insights gained from accounting for women labourers in a sector that remains the second largest employer of women in India today. Her research interests include labour, gender, infrastructural history, social stratification, and social and political movements. Her postdoctoral research explores the history of groups associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, like the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh.

Description

Our time has witnessed a surge of populism, where Taiwan is no exception. Contemporary studies on populism began to identify the intricate relationship between neoliberal globalization and populist politics, where populism is largely conceived as a political reaction to the encroachment of neoliberalism. However, the relationship between the two can be far more complicated than what is often portrayed in the existing literature: Is populism a consequence, a counterforce, or a co-constitutive element of neoliberalism? How does Taiwan fit in the aforementioned question? Is a structural analysis possible against the highly divergent forms of populist politics and neoliberal initiatives? Furthermore, how do Taiwan’s experiences contribute to the theoretical development of the global populism scholarship? Focusing on the restructuring of state-society relations and examining a number of Taiwan’s notable populist movements within their political-economic conjuncture in the post-democratization era, this talk seeks to shed light on the dynamics between neoliberalism and populism in Taiwan and beyond.

Szu-Yun Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. Dr. Hsu received her Ph.D. in geography from the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the intricate dynamics between populism, neoliberalism, and geo-political economy in East Asia with a focus on Taiwan.

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BOOK LAUNCH

Welcome to a book launch for Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone by Tania Li and Pujo Semedi. Professor Tania Li will give a short presentation followed by comments from Professor Thembela Kepe (Geography, U of T) and Professor Bhavani Raman (History, U of T).

“Plantation Life is an eye-opening book on many fronts. It offers up an ethnographically and historically rich account of forms of life in Indonesia’s corporate plantation zone and has much to give about method, collaboration, and evidence. Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi show how the plantation is a presence both fickle and contradictory, at once an occupying force and a source of neglect: occupation and abandonment, order and disorder, theft and calculability, alignment and fracture all coexist in a rough-and-tumble assemblage in which political economy and technologies of power are simultaneously in play. An important book.” — Michael Watts, Class of ’63 Professor, University of California, Berkeley

To learn more about the book and the collaborative research behind it, see https://antropologi.fib.ugm.ac.id/en/plantation-life-2/
The book is available for purchase at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/plantation-life

Description

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming our social, economic and political lives. This is especially true in the case of China, where city governments have begun to experiment with digital technologies to harness the power of big data analytics for governing society. From using biometric checkpoints to track Muslim minorities, to using AI for intelligent traffic management, big data driven applications are mushrooming quickly in Chinese cities. What are China’s digital and big data ambitions and actual local realities? Are these digital experiments more ‘buzz and hype’ or real game changing? Do these technologies alter digital governance practices in authoritarian China and if so, how? Top-down or bottom-up mobilized state-led digitalization? Are digital technologies tools for convenience or control? And how does it alter state-society relations in China? Drawing from interviews, surveys, and a database of local digital initiatives across China, this talk will shed light on the intended and unintended consequences of incorporating digital technologies into local governance processes in Chinese cities.

Genia Kostka is a Professor of Chinese Politics at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on digital transformation, environmental politics, and political economy with a regional focus on China. Her most recent research project explores how digital technologies are integrated into local decision-making and governance structures in China (ERC Starting Grant 2020-2025).

Description

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Asian Institute’s Global Taiwan Program, the Centre for South Asian Studies, the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and WIND Toronto Korean Feminist Collective.  

PART 1  Introduction & Opening Remarks: 9:00am-9:05am  Panel 1: MeToo in East Asia: 9:05am-10:35am  Chang-Ling Huang: Why Asia’s Most Gender Equal Country Has No MeToo Movement?: The Case of Taiwan Hae Yeon Choo: From Madwomen to Whistleblowers: MeToo in South Korea as an Institutional Critique  Di Wang: #MiTu: The social and political costs of becoming an anti-sexual harassment activist in China  Chair: Jesook Song Discussant: Vanita Reddy  Panel 2: MeToo in South Asia: 10:50am-12:00pm  Chaitanya Lakkimsetti: Stripping Away at Respectability: #MeToo India and the Politics of Dignity  Ayesha Khurshid: Na Tuttiya Ve: Spiritual Activism and the #MeToo Movement in Pakistan   Chair: Mahua Sarkar Discussant: Brenda Cossman.

Paticipants’ Bios:  HAE YEON CHOO is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016). Her research on gender, intersectionality, citizenship, and urban sociology has appeared in Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, positions: asia critique, Urban Studies, and Feminist Formations. Her current book project examines social activism in contemporary South Korea as sites of emergent critical social theory and new political imagination. She has translated Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.  

BRENDA COSSMAN is Professor of Law and Goodman-Schipper Chair at the University of Toronto. She was Director of U of T’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies from 2009-2018. Professor Cossman’s teaching and scholarly interests include family law, law and gender, and law and sexuality. Her book The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the Age of #MeToo is published by NYU Press in 2021. Her publications include Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2007), the co-authored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision (University of Toronto Press) and Censorship and the Arts (published by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries).   

CHANG-LING HUANG is a professor of political science at the National Taiwan University. Her research interests are quota politics and women’s political representation. She participates in Taiwan’s feminist movement and was once the president of the Awakening Foundation, the earliest established feminist organization in post-war Taiwan.   

AYESHA KHURSHID is an Associate Professor of Gender and Education at Florida State University. Her ethnographic research focuses on gender, culture, and education in Muslim communities, and examines how gendered subjectivities are produced and contested through education in these contexts. Her current research projects explore the lived experiences of women in a rural community of Pakistan and in a Mayan Muslim community in Chiapas, Mexico.   

CHAITANYA LAKKIMSETTI is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Texas A&M University with a faculty affiliation in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India (NYU Press, 2020). Her work at the intersections of sexuality, law, and social movements also appears in Feminist Formations, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Sexualities, positions: asia critique, and Qualitative Sociology. She is also the co-curator of the dossier “#MeToo and Transnational Gender Justice” for the journal Feminist Formations (2021). Her current work “Sex, Death, and the Law” explores the impact of carceral state agendas on discourses around rape and sexual violence in India.  

VANITA REDDY is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University with a faculty affiliation in women’s and gender studies. Her research examines practices of cultural identity, belonging, and political community within the South Asian American and the global South Asian diaspora. She has published widely on beauty and fashion cultures in diasporic communities, and is the author of Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple University Press, 2016). She is also the coeditor of a special issue of the journal The Feminist and Scholar Online, “Queer and Feminist Afro-Asian Formations” (2018), and has just completed co-editing (with Chaitanya Lakkimsetti) a dossier on the transnational Metoo movement for the journal Feminist Formations (Winter 2021). She is currently writing a book about comparative South Asian diasporas from a feminist and queer perspective, tentatively titled Global Intimacies.  

MAHUA SARKAR is a professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2021, she was Professor of Sociology, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University, New York. A historical sociologist by training, Professor Sarkar’s research and teaching is interdisciplinary and spans a range of topics including contemporary guest-work regimes with particular focus on Bangladeshi male migrants; gestational surrogacy as a new form of racialized and gendered labour; free and unfree/constrained work under global capitalism; religious nationalisms in South Asia; Muslim and Hindu identity formation and the gender question in late colonial Bengal; and epistemological debates underlying qualitative research methods. Her current writing project is an advanced monograph entitled Bidesh Kara (Going Abroad): Bangladeshi Contract Migrants and Contemporary Guest Work.  

JESOOK SONG is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on contemporary urban transformation and welfare issues, including homelessness, youth unemployment, single women’s housing, mental health in South Korea. She is author of South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (Duke University Press, 2009) and Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea (SUNY Press, 2014), On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis (University of Toronto Press 2019, co-edited with Laam Hae).   

DI WANG is a feminist researcher and advocate from China. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin−Madison, USA. Her ten years of experience as a women’s and LGBTQ rights advocate have informed her research, which has been published in Law & Social Inquiry, China Law and Society Review, Qualitative Inquiry, ChinaFile, lambda nordica, and elsewhere.

Description

Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (UC Press, 2019)

The book presentation will be followed by a conversation between Manu Karuka and U of T graduate students.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Learn more about the book at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296640/empires-tracks

Manu Karuka is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, of “On Colonial Unknowing,” a special issue of Theory & Event, and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he is a co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, J19, Settler Colonial Studies, The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (UCLA American Indians Studies Center, 2016, edited by Patrick Wolfe), and Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014, edited by Alyosha Goldstein). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Student participants:

Thomas Blampied, History Department, U of T
Megan Femi-Cole, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, U of T
Yehji Jeong, History Department, U of T
Rui Liu, Women and Gender Studies Institute, U of T
Melanie Ng, History Department, U of T
Fernanda Yanchapaxi Travez, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, U of T

Description

Eastern 2:00-5:00 PM | Central 1:00-4:00 PM | Mountain 12:00-3:00 PM | Pacific 11:00 AM-2:00 PM  NOTE: This was a 3-hour event with a 10-minute break.   

For many years now, discussions have taken place between academics and community leaders on the ethics of research in racialized and Indigenous communities.  Ours to Tell is a collective of Japanese Canadian scholars, community leaders and allies joined in pursuit of change. Racialized researchers have faced longstanding marginalization, are often tokenized and treated as "native informants" in collaborative research rather than scholars in their own right. As well, those outside the community often claim information provided by community knowledge keepers as their “discovery” with no credit given to independent scholars and storytellers. "Unbiased research", "academic detachment" and/or "objectivity" have all been invoked to discount the work of racialized and Indigenous scholars who have chosen to conduct research within their own communities. This form of devaluation privileges research conducted by non-racialized researchers.   A dynamic group of panelistsl discussed the ethics of research in Asian communities, with a focus on, but not limited to Japanese Canadians. Participants included prominent Japanese Canadian scholars, junior Japanese Canadian researchers, and one of the country’s most dynamic leaders in Asian Canadian Studies. The discussion began with a keynote presentation by Dr. Margaret Kovach, an influential and highly regarded Indigenous scholar who has written extensively on the topic of Indigenous Research Methodologies.   Community leaders asked what strategies universities and government funders can employ to ensure that histories and stories told about us acknowledge and fully include our voices and research contributions.  

PARTICIPANTS BIOS:  DR. MARGARET KOVACH is of Nêhiyaw and Saulteaux ancestry from Treaty Four, Saskatchewan and a member of Pasqua First Nation. Dr. Kovach is the Associate Dean for Indigenous Education and a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies, UBC (Vancouver).  She is a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Among her publications, Dr. Kovach is the author of Indigenous Methodologies:  Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (University of Toronto Press) now in its 2nd edition (2021). She is a co-editor of the newly published edited book (2021) Royally Wronged:  The Royal Society of Canada and Indigenous Peoples (2021). Dr. Kovach is an internationally known scholar in Indigenous research methodologies with research interests that include Indigenous higher education and social justice approaches to education. Her research explores ways in which Canadian universities can cultivate environments that enhance the experience for Indigenous scholars and graduate students.    

JENNIFER MATSUNAGA  is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg. Her interdisciplinary research examines reparations for historical injustices in the context of settler states with a particular focus on Canada. She reflects on themes such as truth telling, intergenerational/historical/racial trauma, shame, resilience, assimilation, and colonization. Rooted in her lived experience as a sansei or third generation Japanese Canadian, the stories of her family’s and community’s internment and redress motivate much of her work. She is an active member of numerous academic and community-based committees dealing with questions of decolonization, anti-racism and social justice. She is a founding member of the School of Social Work’s Kinistòtàdimin: On se comprend Circle at the University of Ottawa.   

MONA OIKAWA is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. With Professor Bonita Lawrence, she co-founded the undergraduate degree program, Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity, from which the Indigenous Studies Program was launched in 2018.  She is the author of Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment.  Mona and Kirsten Emiko McAllister are co-editors (with Roy Miki) of the forthcoming book After Redress.   

PAMELA SUGIMAN is a Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. Dr. Sugiman is a member of the Board of Directors of the Atkinson Foundation and Pathways to Education Canada. She is a recipient of the Errol Aspevig Award for Outstanding Academic Leadership (Ryerson), Outstanding Contribution Award (Canadian Sociological Association), Marion Dewar Prize in Canadian Women’s History and has been named as a W.L. Morton Lecturer, Trent University. Dr. Sugiman has written extensively about memory, racism and the internment of Japanese Canadians.   

TOD DUNCAN is the manager of content development for a non-profit association representing municipal social service managers throughout Ontario. There he conducts research on poverty, childcare, and housing to provide education, training, and advocacy for the association’s members. Tod has an MA in Political Science and is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University. His dissertation research focuses on the development of Canadian multiculturalism and its relationship to the internment and redress of Japanese Canadians. Tod has also studied and researched labour and human rights law, as well as migrant labour and the economy.  

BAILEY IRENE MIDORI HOY is a research assistant and graduate of the University of Toronto. A fourth-generation Japanese Canadian, her interests involved work related to diaspora, feminism, and material culture. She will be starting her Master’s at the University of British Columbia in September 2022.  

LAURA ISHIGURO is a yonsei settler living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ territories, and a faculty member in History and Asian Canadian & Asian Migration Studies at UBC. Her current work is reimagining how we tell and teach histories of people of Asian descent, particularly nikkeijin, in northern North America.  

KIRSTEN EMIKO MCALLISTER is a Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. In addition to researching contemporary issues of displacement and exclusion, she has worked closely with Issei and Nisei elders as well as Sansei artists to learn about the intergenerational aftermath of WWII interment camps.  

DR. HENRY YU works in collaboration with community organizations, civic institutions, and government. The often-untold stories of struggles for inclusion and justice inspire him. He is a founding member of the Chinese Canadian Museum  among others, and an honorary member of the National Association of Japanese Canadians Advisory Council.

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BOOK TALK

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City (Harvard University Press), unravels the myth of Shenzhen, showing how the success of this modern “miracle” depended as much on its indigenous villagers and migrant workers as on central planning and policy makers. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, architectural, geographical, political, and economic perspectives, the book uncovers a surprising history—filled with ancient forts, oyster fields, urban villages—and personal narratives of individual contributors to the city. The Shenzhen Experiment is an important story for all rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nations around the world seeking to replicate China’s economic success in the twenty-first century.

The book has received international recognition from a wide spectrum of disciplines such as the “2020 Book of the Year Award” by ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research, “2020 Best Sellers” by the Library Journal, “Top Books” and “Must Reads” by The Architect’s Newspaper (2020), Nature (2020) and International Affairs (2021). The book has been widely reviewed by international media and academic journals, such as Architectural Record, Domus, ICON, City & Society, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Asian Review of Books, Asian Affairs, The Journal of Asian Studies, The China Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Dr. Juan Du is Dean and Professor at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. She has previously taught architecture and urban design at the University of Hong Kong and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and writings have been published in Asia, Europe and the United States, including in The Architectural Review, Volume, Domus, Journal of Architectural Education, e-flux, Time+Architecture, Urban Flux and Urban China. Du is a recognized scholar on China’s rapid urbanization, and her works have been featured by international journals and public media.

Description

The talk will be based on Roselyn Hsueh’s forthcoming book – Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge University Press, expected May 2022)  What is the relationship between internal development and integration into the global economy in developing countries? How and why do state–market relations differ? And do these differences matter in the post-cold war era of global conflict and cooperation? Drawing on research in China, India, and Russia and examining sectors from textiles to telecommunications, Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism introduces a new theory of sectoral pathways to globalization and development. Adopting a historical and comparative approach, the book’s Strategic Value Framework shows how state elites perceive the strategic value of sectors in response to internal and external pressures. Sectoral structures and organization of institutions further determine the role of the state in market coordination and property rights arrangements. The resultant dominant patterns of market governance vary by country and sector within country. These national configurations of sectoral models are the micro-institutional foundations of capitalism, which mediate globalization and development.   Roselyn Hsueh is an associate professor of political science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is the author of Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge University Press, May 2022), China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011), and scholarly articles on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and political economy of development. She is a frequent commentator on politics, finance and trade, and economic development in China and beyond. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post, among other media outlets, have featured her research. The Fulbright Global Scholar Award and other prestigious fellowships have funded research and international fieldwork. She holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Description

China represents Russia’s most powerful ally today. Yet, Russia’s invasion and subsequent international isolation have severely tested this friendship.  Three experts on China and its influence in the post-Soviet region discussed the future of the Chinese-Russian alliance, its impact on the war,  as well as the affect of the war on Chinese foreign policy.   

PANELISTS’ BIOS:  JUDE BLANCHETTE holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Previously, he was engagement director at The Conference Board’s China Center for Economics and Business in Beijing, where he researched China’s political environment with a focus on the workings of the Communist Party of China and its impact on foreign companies and investors. Prior to working at The Conference Board, Blanchette was the assistant director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. Blanchette is a public intellectual fellow at the National Committee on United States-China Relations and serves on the board of the American Mandarin Society. He is also a senior advisor at Martin+Crumpton Group, a geopolitical risk advisory based in Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.A. in modern Chinese studies from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in economics from Loyola University in Maryland.  

PATRICIA KIM is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings and holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She is an expert on Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and U.S. alliance management and regional security dynamics in East Asia. Previously, Kim served as a China specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she focused on China’s impact on conflict dynamics around the world and directed major projects on U.S.-China strategic stability and China’s growing presence in the Red Sea region. Kim received her doctoral degree from the Department of Politics at Princeton University and her bachelor’s degree with highest distinction in political science and Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and proficient in Japanese. Kim is also a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  

YURII POITA is Head of the Asia-Pacific section at the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies (CACDS), and the Asian Section at the New Geopolitics Research Network (NGRN), Ukraine. He is a scientist and researcher of China-Ukraine relations, incl. defence cooperation; China’s influence in the post-Soviet space; and "hybrid" methods of influence. Poita was educated at the Zhytomyr Military Institute (Ukraine) with a degree in military sciences, at the Kyiv International University (with a Master degree in international relations), and is currently working on his PhD dissertation at the Kazakh National University al-Farabi. He has experience in the defense, in think tanks, as well as on individual research projects in a number of Ukrainian, Kazakh and European institutions and think tanks.

Description

We dove into China’s heartland with celebrated author and journalist Peter Hessler, who moved back to China in 2019 to teach writing at Sichuan University.  Hear his stories about deep reporting from a lesser-known region of China. What was it like for a veteran American journalist to to be teaching and reporting from China’s interior during the pandemic?  What is the future of reporting in and on China by foreigners?  Hessler joined us for this timely conversation.    

SPEAKER’S BIO:  For more than twenty years, Peter Hessler has been a staff writer at The New Yorker. He first went to live in China as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1996 to 1998, an experience that became the subject of his first book, River Town. With his next two books—Oracle Bones and Country Driving—he completed a trilogy that spanned a decade in China. In 2011, he moved with his family to Cairo, where he lived for five years. His fifth book, The Buried, described his experiences during the Egyptian Arab Spring.  In 2019, Hessler moved back to Sichuan province, the region where he had served in the Peace Corps more than two decades earlier. For two years, he taught at Sichuan University, where he also covered the pandemic, reporting in Wuhan and other cities during 2020 and 2021. This experience will be the subject of his next book. In 2011, Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow. He currently lives in southwestern Colorado.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK:

What happens when refugees encounter Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their resettlement?

From April to November 1975, the US military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples.

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Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022).

Helga Tawil-Souri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. Helga’s work deals with spatiality, technology, and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on contemporary life in Palestine-Israel.

Professor Sarah Ihmoud is a sociocultural anthropologist who works at the intersection of anthropology and feminist studies. Her current ethnographic research in Jerusalem focuses on militarization, state violence and Palestinian feminist politics. She also writes about the politics of sexual violence and feminist approaches to activist research in anthropology. In addition to her research, Dr. Ihmoud is invested in building collaborative Black, Indigenous and women of color feminist praxes in and outside of the academy geared towards expanding visions of liberation and decolonial futures.

Thy Phu is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. She is coeditor of Feeling Photography, also published by Duke University Press, and Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. She is also author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture.