Description

Join this virtual event via Zoom: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86914380300
Meeting ID: 869 1438 0300
Passcode: 464253

With the launch of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Japan’s colonies saw the full-scale launch of kōminka (imperialization) policies designed to turn the colonized into loyal subjects of the emperor. In this book talk, Christina Yi will explore the central role kokugo (national language) ideology played in the articulation and promotion of imperial identity during the latter years of Japan’s colonial rule, exploring how and why “Korean” literature was repositioned within a larger Japanese language canon. Although it is often understood that the kōminka movement introduced a new paradigm of the “imperial subject,” who might be included in this category varied according to class, gender, ethnicity, and place.

This presentation will elaborate on this point through a close comparative analysis of Kim Sŏngmin’s 1936 novella Hantō no geijutsukatachi (Artists of the Peninsula) and its 1941 film adaptation Hantō no haru (Spring on the Peninsula; dir. Yi Pyŏng-il).

CHRISTINA YI is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. She is a specialist of modern Japanese-language literature and culture, with a particular focus on issues of postcoloniality, language ideology, genre, and cultural studies. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. She was also the co-editor for a special feature on zainichi (resident) Korean literature and film for Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019).

Description

How do governments cultivate loyal citizens? Leading China experts present their latest research on patriotic education in China and ideology.

Panelists’ Bios:

KARRIE J. KOESEL is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame where she specializes in the study of contemporary Chinese and Russian politics, authoritarianism, and religion and politics. She is the author of Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict and the Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Citizens & the State in Authoritarian Regimes: Comparing China and Russia (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Learning to Be Loyal: Patriotic Education in Authoritarian Regimes that explores how authoritarian leaders cultivate popular legitimacy and loyalty among young people; how they socialize citizens and the future elite to be patriotic and supportive; and whether these strategies free autocrats from the need to rely so heavily on coercion to stay in power.  

RORY TRUEX is an Assistant Professor in Princeton’s Department of Politics and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His research focuses on Chinese politics and theories of authoritarian rule. His book Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China investigates the nature of representation in authoritarian systems, specifically the politics surrounding China’s National People’s Congress (NPC). He argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engineering a system of “representation within bounds” in the NPC, fostering information revelation but silencing political activism. Original data on deputy backgrounds and behaviors is used to explore the nature of representation, policymaking, and incentives in this constrained system. He is currently working on a new set of projects on repression, human rights, and dissent in contemporary China. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Comparative Political Studies, China Quarterly, among other journals.  

YINGYI MA is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Provost Faculty Fellow on internationalization at Syracuse University. In 2019, she was selected as a Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations.  Professor Ma is a sociologist of education and migration. She has published extensively in the areas of education stratification, international student mobility and higher education in China. Her new book, Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese Undergraduates Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education, is published by Columbia University Press in Feb 2020, and has since been featured in various national and international media outlets such as Washington Post and Times Higher Education. She got her PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University in 2007.

Description

Matthew J Walton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research and publications focus on ethnic politics and Buddhist political thought in Myanmar, including his book Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (2016, Cambridge University Press).  

Jacques Bertrand is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto; Director, Masters’ Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies (Asian Institute, Munk School). He has conducted extensive research on the peace process in Myanmar, and is the co-author with Alexandre Pelletier and Ardeth Thawnghmung of Winning by Process: The State, Democratic Transition, and Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar (forthcoming 2021, Cornell UP).

Description

The Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University and the Centre for the Study of Korea (CSK) at the University of Toronto are inviting you to the presentation by Prof. Sophia Seung-Yoon Lee (Chung-Ang University) on February 25, 2021 (Thursday), 4 to 5:30 pm (EST).   

Korea’s platform labor market expanded considerably in a short period of time and there is also a diversity of platform labor. The purpose of this talk is to understand the operation of the Korean platform labor market and how the forms for work mismatch with Korean social security system. The study categorizes platform companies and platform labor in the Korean platform labor market, and examines differences and commonalities in their labor processes through case studies on delivery platforms, domestic service platforms, and freelance platforms. The differences according to the type of platform labor are as follows. First, the delivery platform was mainly mediated by four-way relations, and the domestic services and freelance platforms by three-way relationships. Second, the intensity of labour control and involvement of platform labor of platform companies was strong in the order of delivery platform, house service platform and freelance platform. Third, the differences in social security experiences and needs were mainly found in industrial accident insurance. The analysis confirms that the mismatch between platform labor and social security system does not only come from the vague employment relationship of platform workers, but rather the differences among the types of platform work need to be considered in discussing social security reform to solve the mismatch problem.

Sophia Seung-Yoon Lee received her DPhil (PhD) in Social Policy from the University of Oxford (UK) with her thesis on A Comparative study of East Asian welfare states and nonstandard workers. Her research interests are East Asian welfare state and labour markets, precarious work, basic income and institutionalism. Some of her selected publications are “Institutional legacy of state corporatism in de-industrial labour markets: a comparative study of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Socio-economic Review (2016),” “Precarious Workers in South Korea, 한국의 불안정 노동자 Seoul: Humanitas, co-authored (2017),” “Precarious Elderly Workers in Post-Industrial South Korea, Journal of Contemporary Asia (2018).”  She was a member of the 4th National Pension Reform Committee of Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare and currently the vice chairperson of Youth Policy Coordination Committee of Rep. of Korea.   

This event is organized by Hae Yeon Choo (University of Toronto) and is presented by the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto.  

For more information: kore@yorku.ca || https://kore.info.yorku.ca/calendar/

Description

ASIA-PACIFIC CONVERSATIONS  

In recent years, researchers have highlighted the importance of using “Asia” as a site to develop new research tools and methods to rethink the global world. The outbreak of Covid-19, in many ways, has only heightened this call. Beyond the Asian stories of  “failures” and “successes” in dealing with the ongoing public health crisis, the pandemic has exacerbated the existing geopolitical tensions, dispossession, as well as state violence against minorities and political dissidents, all against the backdrop of a series of ever-growing planetary crises.   With the pandemic still evolving, how should specialists of Asia begin to examine their “field” when the field itself is mutating, and when there is no clear sense of how to go about documenting and knowing the unknown? In this conversation, distinguished Asia scholars working from a variety of interdisciplinary contexts, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, and media studies, will reflect on the challenges of conducting research into the unknown in a politicized, racialized, sensationalized, and emotion-laden environment.

Panelists’ Bios:

MICHAEL BERRY is a translator and author who is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has written and edited eight books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). A two time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Berry’s book-length translations include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library, and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) by Fang Fang.   

BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches environmental media and global postcolonial studies. Much of her early scholarly work interrogated the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. Apart from works that address global mediascapes, in the last decade, Ghosh turned to risk distributions and their relationship to media. She has written several essays on the subject and has co-edited collection (with Bhaskar Sarkar), The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (2020). She is completing a single-authored , The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media which considers how mediatic processes detect and compose epidemics as crises events.   

RALPH LITZINGER is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press, 2000), and, more recently, with Carlos Rojas, Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China (Duke University Press, 2016). He has published in leading cultural anthropology and Asian studies journals. He directed Duke’s Asia/Pacific Studies Institute from 2001-2007, and the Duke Engage Migrant Education Project from 2008-2015. His new research concerns questions of planetary futures, digital labor and platform capitalism, human and post-human techno-imaginaries. His most recent publication, with Fan Yang, is “Eco-Media Events in China: From Yellow Eco-Peril to Media Materialism,” Environmental Humanities, May 2020.

Description

The year 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of Taiwan’s introduction of degree-pursuing Mainland Chinese students (lusheng) to its higher education institutions. However, this landmark moment also witnesses the demise of lusheng policies across the Taiwan Strait. China’s Ministry of Education has suspended lusheng enrollment in Taiwanese colleges beginning this fall. How might we address the shifting political economy which shapes and contests lusheng policies? How have the lived experiences of lusheng brought new meanings to the geopolitical terrains under which these policies came into being? In what ways have the recent COVID-19 pandemic intensified the political and personal conundrums facing lusheng? This film screening and Q&A event seeks to understand the mounting geopolitical tension between Taiwan and China by directing focus on the stories of lusheng in Taiwan.  

Discussant’s bio:

Michelle Cho is an assistant professor of East Asian Popular Cultures in the Department of East Asian Studies, and graduate faculty in Cinema Studies, University of Toronto. Her research interests include East Asian cinema, television, video, and pop music, genre cinemas, social media platforms, and Korean-wave pop culture fandoms.  

FILM SYNOPSIS:  Our Youth In Taiwan (dir. Fu Yue) is a story of resistance, collaboration, and frustration between three protagonists: Cai Boyi, a politically engaged mainland Chinese student in Taiwan; Chen Wei-ting, a student leader of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement; and Fu Yue, the documentary filmmaker. As their interwoven narratives unfold, the meanings of democracy, national belonging, social movement, political engagement, sexuality, and even filmmaking are called into question.   

The film won the Best Documentary at the 2018 Taipei Golden Horse Awards. In her award acceptance speech, director Fu Yue advocated for the recognition of Taiwan as an “independent entity.”   

Based in the Global Taiwan Studies Program at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto, The Taiwan Gazette is a student-run online platform that aims to introduce Chinese-language sources about Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China to a wider readership across the English-speaking world. It also features Taiwan-related student research and introduces scholarly works which approach Taiwan in critical perspectives and methods.

FILM SCREENING: March 8 (12 pm) to March 14 (11:59 pm EST)  

***To receive the link for the film screening, please register on the Eventbrite below***

Description

Transcendence has been largely mobilized in formulating a modern nation-state in Korea. In this talk the presenter looks into how religion is constructed in relation with the development of secular modernity in Korea from a perspective of circulatory history. The category of religion appeared in Korea in processes through which East Asia was incorporated into the globalized modern world. Unlike those in China and Japan, a considerable portion of Korea’s enlightenment elites and major nationalists recalled spiritual societies to the making of the Korean nation in the globalized East. Such formation of religion in modern Korea was greatly attributed to the colonial and postcolonial politics of the secular nation-building. Rather than condemned as a symbol of feudalism, irrationality and imperialism, religion was largely thought of as an alternative venue of communication for resisting colonialism, contributing to national enlightenment as well as overcoming the nation’s geopolitical limit in the Far East.

Dr. Kyuhoon Cho is a research associate in the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. Previously he taught at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul National University and Nanyang Technological University. His research and teaching focus on Korean religions and heritage in the context of globalization.

Description

“The Political Life of Information” series at the Asian Institute brings together scholars, activists, artists, and other practitioners to reflect on practices of surveillance, data visualization, population management and identification, news and journalism, and the social aspects of algorithms from a perspective based in Asia, but speaking to a broad audience interested in the political ramifications of media and information technology.

This, our second event will focus on the edited volume, Lives of Data, edited by Sandeep Mertia, a groundbreaking new study mapping the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts.   Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the Sarai programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. It brings together fifteen interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to set up a collaborative research agenda on computational cultures. The essays offer wide-ranging analyses of media and techno-scientific trajectories of data analytics, disruptive formations of digital economy, and the grounded practices of data-driven governance in India. Encompassing history, anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), media studies, civic technology, data science, digital humanities, and journalism, the essays open up possibilities for a truly situated global and sociotechnically specific understanding of the many lives of data.    

*** Link to the Lives of Data volume, published in the "Theory on Demand" series by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam:  https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/lives-of-data-essays-on-computational-cultures-from-india/

SANDEEP MERTIA is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and Urban Doctoral Fellow at New York University. He is an ICT engineer by training, and former Research Associate at The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.  

TONG LAM is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and a visual artist. He is the author of A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 (University of California Press, 2011), Abandoned Futures: A Journey to the Posthuman World (Carpet Bombing Culture, 2013), and the co-editor (with Jahnavi Phalkey) of the inaugural special issue of BJHS Themes: Sciences of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century (2016). His current research focuses on information, infrastructure, special zones, and borders in socialist and postsocialist China. His ongoing research-based visual projects examine contemporary China’s breakneck transformation, as well as the material evidence of Cold War mobilizations globally and their environmental and social consequences. He has exhibited his photographic and video works internationally.   

SARAH SHARMA is Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT. Her research and teaching focuses on the relationship between technology, time, and labour with a specific focus on the politics of gender and race. She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014). Sarah is currently at work on a new book on technology and feminism tentatively titled Broken Machine Feminism. Next year Duke University Press will publish her co-edited collection MsUnderstanding Media: A Feminist Medium is the Message (with Rianka Singh). She has also published articles in such venues as Cultural Studies, The Boston Review, Feminist Media Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, and Transfers: Journal of Mobility Studies.  

MARIANA VALVERDE is a noted sociolegal scholar who has worked on diverse issues and topics over the years, but has recently focused attention on ‘smart city’ initiatives, mainly in Canada but also elsewhere including India. Her most recent book is the co-edited collection Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs (2020)

Description

The first ever graduate symposium in contemporary South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto was conceived of as a platform for students engaging in critical research connected to South Asia. As the pandemic disrupts our societies, it serves as a stark reminder of the importance of social relations and the need to transform the “normal.” Presenters in the conference draw our attention to a range of lenses to observe and imagine possibilities within history, religion, politics and technology. We invite students, faculty, professionals, and practitioners of South Asian Studies from across geographies to engage with and learn about emerging research in the field. We are immensely proud of the team at South Asian Studies that brought this event together and we wish all of our brilliant participants good luck with their presentations and academic journeys.

Asmita Bhutani, PhD student, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Centre for South Asian Studies
Sarah Alam, PhD student, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Centre for South Asian Studies
(Co-Chairs of the CSAS Graduate Symposium 2021)

***Follow the link below to view the Symposium Program***

PLEASE NOTE: The registration for the Keynote Address is conducted separately from the registration for the CSAS Graduate Symposium. Follow the link below to register for the Keynote Address via Zoom and register for the Symposium via Eventbrite OR copy/paste the URLs below in your web browser:

* Register for the Keynote Address: https://bit.ly/3tdiMGH

* Register for the Symposium: https://csasgradsymposium2021.eventbrite.ca

* For further information: https://uoft.me/CSASGrad21