Description

"Poetic Refuge: Migration and the Films of Phuttiphong Aroonpheng" was the fourth seminar for the Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics, JHI-UTM Seminar 2020-2021, co-hosted by the Department of Visual Studies, the Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, the UTM Collaborative Digital Research Space, University of Toronto, the Toronto Film and Media Seminar and Objectifs.   

* Screenings details for Manta Ray will be provided on Oct 31st to the first 100 registrants based in Canada.   

* The film "Ferris Wheel" can be screened for free until November 4th here: https://objectifsfilmlibrary.uscreen.io/programs/ferris_wheel_  

Both films will be available from Oct 31st to Nov 4th.

Description

Morning Session | 9:00 – 10:30 am EST  

9:00-9:10am Welcome remark by Hyun-Ok Park (York)  

9:10-9:20am Introduction to the Symposium: Hae Yeon Choo (U of Toronto)

9:20-10:30am Keynote Speech   

Chair: Yewon Lee (George Washington University)  

Discussant: Laam Hae (York University)   

Hyun Bang Shin (LSE) “Whither Progressive Urban Futures? Critical Reflections on the Politics of Temporality in Asia”

Evening Session | 6:00 – 8:45 pm EST   

6:00-7:15pm Panel 1: The Making of the Speculative City: Past and Present  

Chair: Yoonkyung Lee (U of Toronto)

Discussant: Hyun Bang Shin (LSE)   

Hyun-Chul Kim (U of Toronto) “Juxtaposing Biopolitics with Speculative Urbanisms: The Development of Private Welfare/Health Institutions in South Korea”   

Seung-Cheol Lee (Seoul National University) “Seeing Like a Community Entrepreneur: The Capitalization of ‘Community’ in Seoul’s Community Building Project (maul mandulgi)”   

7:15-7:30pm Break   

7:30-8:45pm Panel 2: The Unmaking of the Speculative City  

Chair: Hyun-Chul Kim (U of Toronto)  

Discussant: Jesook Song (U of Toronto)   

Laam Hae (York) “Toward a Dialectical Vision of Planetary Urbanization: Ecological Pro-Greenbelt Movements against the Construction State in Korea”   

Yewon Lee (George Washington University) “Precarious Workers in the Speculative City: Making Worker’s Power of Self-Employed Tenant Shopkeepers in Seoul through the Production of Space”   

Participants’ Bios:   

Hae Yeon Choo is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is an author of Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016), a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea: factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Her current research examines the politics of land ownership in contemporary South Korea, delving into macro-level political contestations over land rights, together with the narratives of people who pursue class mobility through real estate speculation. She has also translated Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.  

Laam Hae is an Associate Professor in the department of Politics at York University. Her research areas are urban political economy, neoliberal urbanism and urban social movements. She is the author of The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City: Regulating Spaces of Social Dancing in New York (2012, Routledge), and co-edited On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis (2019, University of Toronto Press). She is currently developing a research project that examines the spatiality of social reproduction and gender inequality in South Korea.   

Hyun-Chul Kim is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto. Her research interests include the varied degree of confined, segregated spaces in East Asian regions, from nursing homes to prisons, considering urban constructions, intimacy, and disability. She is writing her dissertation tentatively titled “Between Communal ‘Village’ and an Atomized ‘Home’: Blurring the boundaries of community organization movement and segregated-confined welfare spaces of South Korea in 1950s-1960s”.  

Seung Cheol Lee received his PhD from Columbia University in 2018 and is now an assistant professor of anthropology at Seoul National University. His research interests are focused on the question of how neoliberal financialization has reshaped people’s social, affective, ethical, and political lives. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how the ethicality and sociality of gift-giving are grafted onto neoliberal market rationality in the social economy sector in South Korea.  

Yewon Andrea Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Korean Studies at George Washington University. As a political and labor sociologist and urban ethnographer, Yewon is broadly interested in how speculative real estate interests increasingly dictate the shape and character of urban landscapes and how, in response, ordinary people organize everyday space and practice politics of dissent. Her dissertation, Precarious Workers in the Speculative City: The Untold Gentrification Story of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Displacement and Resistance in Seoul, examines how tenant shopkeepers, who are often labeled as either micro-entrepreneurs or petit bourgeoisie and overlooked as workers, are emerging as agents of social change. She sheds light on the fascinating case of tenant shopkeepers in Seoul organizing to expose the precarity of their livelihoods and, along the way, finding their collective voice as workers.  

Yoonkyung Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the director of the Center for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. She is a political sociologist specializing in labor politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011) and numerous journal articles that appeared in Globalizations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Critical Asian Studies.  

Hyun Ok Park teaches sociology and the director of the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University. With archival and ethnographic research, her research investigates global capitalism in colonial, industrial, and financial forms, democracy, socialism, and post-socialist transition. She is the author of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005). Her latest book is The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015). She is completing a book manuscript, “A Sublime Disaster: The Sewŏl Ferry Incident and the Politics of the Living Dead.”    

Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at LSE. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of urbanisation with particular attention to cities in Asian countries such as China, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore. His research themes include speculative urbanisation; the politics of redevelopment; displacement; gentrification; housing; the right to the city; mega-events as urban spectacles; mega-projects. He has published widely in major international journals and contributed to numerous books on the above themes. His books include Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015); Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016); Anti Gentrification: What is to be Done (Dongnyok, 2017); Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).  

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).  

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

Description

Japan | 2019 | 179 min | Japanese with English subtitles | Closed Captions, Drama, Fantasy   

In the port town of Onomichi, Japan, the only movie theatre is bidding goodbye to its local audiences. The owners organize a nightlong screening devoted to historical Japanese war films. Noriko, a teenager who regularly helps in the theatre, walks toward the stage and astonishes the audience as suddenly, she mystically projects herself into an old musical. Film buff Mario, film-history nerd Hosuke, and aspiring yakuza Shigeru are also warped into the cinema screen in sequences that represent the second Sino-Japanese War, Boshin War and Hiroshima bombing. The four embark on an immersive, surreal and vicious cycle of damnation and salvation in the face of war’s savagery.  Nobuhiko Obayashi’s swan song Labyrinth of Cinema dives into the senselessness of wars, wrapped in cinematic oddities. His abstracted reconstruction of Japan’s darkest events points out that movies, though a fabrication of reality, epitomize suffering as universal truth.  – Rolando Basmayor

CAST: Rei Yoshida Yoshihiko Hosoda Hirona Yamazaki Riko Narumi  

Recognitions: OFFICIAL SELECTION Tokyo International Film Festival, 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival, 2020  

Director Bio: Nobuhiko Obayashi 大林 宣彦  Nobuhiko Obayashi (9 January 1938 – 10 April 2020) was a Japanese director, screenwriter, and editor of films and television advertisements. He began his filmmaking career as a pioneer of Japanese experimental films before transitioning to directing more mainstream media, and his resulting filmography as a director spanned almost 60 years

RELATED EVENT: Live Online Discussion With Special Guests

DATE: November 18, 6:30 PM  

Unpack the layers of this film with our special guests Rob Buscher of Philly Asian American Film Festival and Daisuke Miyao of University of California San Diego. ASL interpretation will be made available thanks to Toronto Sign Language Interpreter Services. Ticket holders can watch on the CineSend Reel Asian portal.  

GUEST SPEAKERS:  

ROB BUSCHER Board Chair of the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival  Rob Buscher is a film and media specialist, educator, arts administrator, and published author who has worked in non profit arts organizations for over a decade. Buscherʼs expertise is Japanese and Asian American & Pacific Islander Cinema although he has worked as a  professional film programmer, critic, and lecturer across a variety of fields.  He currently lectures at University of  Pennsylvania, and is a contributing writer at Pacific Citizen and Broad Street Review. Buscher also serves as President of the Philadelphia Chapter of civil rights group  Japanese American Citizens League and chairs the editorial board of Pacific Citizen, the organization’s national newspaper.  

DAISUKE MIYAO  Professor in Department of Literature, University of California at San Diego  Considering cinema to be a transnational cultural form from the beginning of its history and simultaneously to be a national entity, formed by specific discourses on nationalism and modernization, Daisuke Miyao has been conducting research on film history. His interdisciplinary training in cinema studies, East Asian studies, and American studies, combined with his bicultural background, living and studying both in Japanese and North American academia, made it possible for him to recognize that the study of film could benefit from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Description

* Screening Dates: November 12 – 19, 2020  

* Register above for FREE screening  

* Related Event: A.K.A Don Bonus Masterclass – November 17, 6:30 – 8:30 PM (Scroll down for details; by registering for the screening, you are also getting access to the masterclass and vice versa)    

USA | 1995 | 65 min | English | Archive Presentation | Documentary   

Cambodian-born Sokly “Don Bonus” Ny takes a Hi8 camcorder into his final year of high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, documenting intersecting events happening at school, at home, and amongst friends and family. Filmed and released in 1995, the film can be seen as a forerunner of the now-popular diary or vlog documentary format, featuring raw footage and voiceover from Don Bonus.  Although made in the 1990s, the beats of the film are familiar and still relevant, moving through issues of low-income housing, gang violence, academic struggle, and family fractures, while also featuring communal celebration, youthful camaraderie and intimate family life. These scenes are simultaneously casual and intentional, recontextualized and given resonance through Don Bonus’ frank, teenage monologic reflections.  A.K.A Don Bonus highlights how the stories that came before us, although constructed from their time and space, can continue to speak powerfully into our present.  – Jasmine Gui

CAST: Sokly Ny  

Recognitions OFFICIAL SELECTION Berlin International Film Festival, 1996 San Francisco Film Festival, 1995   AWARDS National Emmy Award, 1996 Golden Gate Award, San Francisco Film Festival, 1995  

DIRECTOR BIO

Spencer Nakasako has over three decades of experience as an independent filmmaker and is the founder of the groundbreaking Media Lab at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. Nakasako is a member of the Writers Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

RELATED EVENT: A.K.A. Don Bonus Masterclass

DATE: November 17, 6:30 – 8:30 PM   

Deep dive into this critical archival film with director Spencer Nakasako, Reel Asian, and the Asian Institute! This masterclass will explore the narrative construction of A.K.A Don Bonus, methods of production, the vlog-style documentary format, and contextualize the film in its era but also situate it in ongoing contemporary conversations.  

SPEAKERS:

Spencer Nakasako • Director

Spencer Nakasako has over three decades of experience as an independent filmmaker. He won a National Emmy Award for a.k.a. Don Bonus, the video diary of a Cambodian refugee teenager that aired on the PBS series P.O.V. and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. Kelly Loves Tony, a video diary about a Iu Mien refugee teenage couple growing up too fast in Oakland, California, also aired on P.O.V. His third film in his trilogy about Southeast Asian youth, Refugee, aired on the PBS series Independent Lens, and garnered major awards at the Hawaii International Film Festival and Hamptons Film Festival. Nakasako is the founder of the ground-breaking Media Lab at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where he collaborated with youth from the neighborhood on filmmaking for 17 years.  

Miko Revereza • Filmmaker  

Miko Revereza is a filmmaker raised in California and currently residing between several countries. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant in the United States informs his relationship with moving images. DROGA! (2014), DISINTEGRATION 93-96 (2017), No data plan (2018) and Distancing (2019) have widely screened at festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYFF Projections and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real. Aside from these films, Revereza produces expanded cinema, direct animation, performance, criticism and publishing including works such as Biometrics (2018), Live Cinema (2019-2020) and Towards a Stateless Cinema (2019). Revereza is listed as Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema, a 2019 Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker and MFA graduate at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. He is a 2021 recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking.  

MODERATOR: Aram Siu Wai Collier • Head of Programming, Reel Asian  

Aram Siu Wai Collier is a filmmaker, educator, and film festival programmer. He has a background in documentary, editing the award-winning feature documentary Refugee and directing/editing the short doc Who I Became. His subsequent dramatic and experimental film work has played festivals in the United States, Canada, Japan, and China. From 2011-2014, his omnibus live music and film project Suite Suite Chinatown toured Canada, Asia, and the United States. In 2017, he wrote, directed, edited, and produced the feature film Stand Up Man, which had its World premiere at the Atlantic Film Festival and its International Premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival. Most recently Aram directed and edited the award-winning short documentary A Sweet & Sour Christmas for CBC. He is currently the Head of Programming at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and teaches Media Production at Humber College.  

Registration for Masterclass: https://www.reelasian.com/festival-events/aka-donbonus-masterclass/ ***Ticket Registration for the A.K.A Don Bonus Masterclass includes access to the A.K.A Don Bonus film.

Description

This talk will drew on material in the speaker’s recent book, Vigil:Hong Kong on the Brink, while also dealing with events that have happened since he finished making the last corrections to the proofs of it almost exactly a year before the day this presentation has been made. The quintet of key moments in Hong Kong history addressed (the five "acts" in the title) was the period around the time of the following events: the 1997 Handover, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, series of lesser known but important events in late 2015 and 2016, the 2019 protest surge, and the 2020 actions associated with imposing of the new National Security Law.  

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in Law and Literary Journalism. His most recent books are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) and, as co-author with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, third edition, 2018). He often contributes to newspapers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc.), literary reviews (such as the TLS, Mekong Review, and LARB), and magazines (e.g., The Nation and Dissent). He served as Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies from 2008 until 2019; he was an adviser to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival; he has consulted on documentary films about the Tiananmen protests and the Umbrella Movement; and he has edited or co-edited books on topics ranging from gender in China’s past and present to human rights and revolutions.

Sebastian Veg is a Professor of intellectual history of modern and contemporary China at EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris and an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His most recent books are Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals (Columbia UP, 2019) and Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong (co-edited with Thomas Gold, 2020).

Description

Re: Locations Symposium 2020  

COVID-19 is a public health crisis occurring on a global scale. It has caused widespread suffering and disruption, and in the process, it has exacerbated existing inequalities; strengthened networks of solidarity; birthed new crises; devastated economies, altered politics at local, national, and international levels; and, more. In these ways, the virus is a disaster that has given rise to complex and uncertain transformations, but it has also led to a great display of resiliency, with different states, communities, and individuals adapting to and resisting this disaster. The global spread has laid bare the need for critical engagement with cross-disciplinary, cross-national, and cross-cultural dialogues.  

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE  

November 19: Migration, Care Work, and Solidarity  

2:50 PM- 3:00 PM Co-Chairs Introduction  

3:00 PM | Keynote Address: Dr. Tungohan – COVID-19, Immigration, & Care Work: Thinking Through the Implications of COVID-19 on the Lives of Asian Migrants  

3:45 – 5:45 PM | Panel 1  

John Paul Catungal | Mediating Contagion: Asian International Students in Canada during COVID  

Md. Zarif Rahman, Saifuddin Ahmed & Mahabuba Islam Meem | Fatalistic Views and Its Impact on Combating COVID-19: Bangladesh Context  

Joy Saade | The Beirut Explosion and Covid-19: Crisis relief and community reactions during Lebanon’s collapse  

Yuriko Cowper-Smith, Dr. Yvonne Smith & Tyler Valiquette | Displaced and in the dark: Protecting LGBTQI+ asylum-seekers during a pandemic  

5:45 – 6:15 Q&A SESSION AND CLOSING REMARKS

November 23 | Media, Security, and Communications

2:50 PM- 3:00 PM Co-Chairs Introduction  

3:00 PM | Keynote Address: Dr. Ong  

3:45 – 5:25 PM | Panel 2  

Gabrielle Lim, Irene Poetranto & Justin Law | Securitizing COVID-19 in the Philippines: Outcomes and Risks  

Anmol Dutta | Coro(Na)tional Solidarity Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic in India  

Richard Atimniraye Nyelade | The Racial and Olfactory Origin of Social Distancing  

Isurika Sevwandi | COVID-19 Disaster Prevention Mechanism undertaken by Sri Lanka: SWOT Analysis  5:25 – 6:00 Q&A SESSION AND CLOSING REMARKS

November 26: Public Health and the Global South  

9:50 AM- 10:00 AM Co-Chairs Introduction  

10:00 AM | Keynote Address: Dr. Lasco – Medical Populism in the Global South  

11:14AM – 12:15PM | Panel 3  

Ritapriya Nandy | India during Pandemic: The Curious Case of Witch-hunting  

Faizan Malik | Covid-19, Necropolitics, and Marginalized Experiences During a Global Pandemic  

Mufassir Rashid | ‘Corona Effect’ on South Asian Politics: Diminishing Geopolitics and the inception of Geo-economics  

Adrian Khan | Migration and Social Isolation during the Global Pandemic: Uncertainty, advocacy, and resilience  

12:15 – 12:45 Q&A SESSION AND CLOSING REMARKS

Description

Supporters of South Korean authoritarian successor party have organized a movement called the Taegeukgi Rally. This movement started in late 2016 to oppose the impeachment of then President, Park Geun-hye. Then, the movement transformed into anti-government protest after the formation of the new administration by President Moon Jae-in. This movement is puzzling in many ways and the literature on mass mobilization does not provide a good explanation about the movement’s timing, demographic composition, and protest agendas. This study suggested an alternative explanation to understand the mobilization. By conducting in-depth interviews with 25 rally participants, this study found that the collective identity of participants that was shaped in the authoritarian period motivates certain individuals to participate in the rally.  

Myunghee Lee is a visiting fellow at the University of Missouri and a non-resident research fellow at the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia. She earned her Ph.D in Political Science at the University of Missouri. She is the recipient of the 2020 David M. Wood Excellence in Political Science Research Award. Her research focuses on protest, democratization, and state violence. Her research appears in International Security and Politics & Gender.  

Zoom Details  

Join Zoom Meeting  https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/81616949449     

Meeting ID: 816 1694 9449  

Passcode: 030791  

Description

The Indian economy, one of the largest in the world, is set to contract significantly this year. Our panel of experts discussed policy measures adopted by the Indian government to tackle the economic downturn as a result of the devastating effects of COVID 19 pandemic in the country. The panel also discussed short and medium run scenarios for the Indian economy highlighting the interdependence between democratic institutions, economic growth and welfare. Finally, the panelists also discussed India’s regional and international economic relations in the context of the present crisis in globalization and the country’s border impasse with China.

Description

Which histories of Asia are remembered and which are forgotten? The process of remembering is selective, such that certain histories are granted the status of truth and highlighted in public dialogue, while others are forgotten or deliberately swept under the rug. This event sought to unearth some examples of the latter to underscore the histories of marginalized groups and their lived experiences. In order to do so we were delighted to be joined by two experts. Dr. Takashi Fujitani discussed the issue of comfort women and how it tied into the transnational cover-up of Japanese war and colonial crimes. Dr. Jessica Soedirgo focused her discussion on the little known Ahmadiyah minority in Indonesia and why its members are being discriminated against today.  

TAKASHI FUJITANI is the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies. His research focuses especially on modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, Asian American history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia Pacific). Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. He is the author of Splendid Monarchy (UC Press, 1996; Japanese version, NHK Books, 1994; Korean translation, Yeesan Press, 2003) and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII (UC Press, 2011; Japanese version forthcoming from Iwanami Shoten); co-editor of Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Duke U. Press, 2001); and editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern (UC Press).  

JESSICA SOEDIRGO is a postdoctoral fellow in the Asian Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Studies, Georgetown University. She will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam in April 2021. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Her research is motivated by an interest in ethnic and religious conflict, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. She primarily uses qualitative methods, grounded in extensive fieldwork. Her book project, The Threat of Small Things: Patterns of Repression and Mobilization Against Micro-Sized Groups in Indonesia, asks why very small groups become targets of state repression and mobilization despite their economic and political insignificance. Her work has been published in Citizenship Studies, Southeast Asia Research, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and PS: Political Science and Politics.

Description

How do ideas of forestry, rural life, nature, and environment contribute to the rise of fascism and authoritarian rule? In this timely conversation, a group of historians and visual scholars drew on specific cases from early twentieth-century Japan to contemporary China and India to examine the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and temporality.

Description

Tibetan emic terminologies used as functional equivalents for “religion” and “politics” in Bhutanese textual sources shed light on institutionalized and conceptualized boundaries between societal spheres in pre-modern Bhutan―in the spirit of the multiple secularities approach understood as social distinction and differentiation in a non-evaluating sense.  Among the three major Buddhist governments established in the Tibetan cultural area in the 17th century, the Bhutanese government, nowadays as a constitutional monarchy with a Buddhist king, is the only one still in existence. Since Bhutan’s societal order is still profoundly grounded in the cosmological order of Tantric Buddhism, Dr. Schwerk presented an alternative analytical and inclusive framework for determining social distinction and differentiation in Bhutan in a chronological perspective that did include not only actual institutional arrangements but also integrated formative religious-doctrinal conceptualizations. Consequently, discourses about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) can adequately consider the importance of terminology, language, and “secularities.”  

Dagmar Schwerk is the Khyentse Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of British Columbia and recipient of the Khyentse Foundation Award for Excellence in Buddhist Studies 2012. Her forthcoming monograph addresses the longstanding philosophical debate about Mahāmudrā, an essential Buddhist doctrine and meditative system in Tibetan Buddhism, from a Bhutanese perspective. In general, her research focuses on Tibetan and Bhutanese intellectual and political history.

Description

Vladimir Norov has been Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation since January 2019. A senior diplomat with decades of service to the Republic of Uzbekistan, Norov has had posts as Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and Belgium. He speaks English, German, Russian, and Tajik.

Registrants may send questions for Mr. Norov by 8 January to beltandroad.munkschool@utoronto.ca; we will pose as many questions as time allows.

This event is part of the Belt and Road in Global Perspective Project and is co-sponsored by the CERES Eurasia Initiative and the Asian Institute.

Description

* This conference is for STUDENTS ONLY and is open to all U of T undergraduate and graduate students. *

Organized by the Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union (CASSU) and Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, the conference brings together students, faculty, alumni and industry professionals to share personal career journeys and industry trends. This year’s online conference offers speakers the opportunity to reflect on how the pandemic and other large-scale global forces have impacted their field of work.

Upon registering for the Global Careers through Asia Conference you will receive the webinar link for Day 1 and/or Day 2 three days before the conference start date. If you sign up to attend both days of the conference, you will receive both links.

DAY 1 | January 28, 2021 | 10 :00 am – 11 :30 am

The first day of the conference features opening remarks from the Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union and Professor Rachel Silvey (Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute). The Public Sector and Academia industry panel includes presentations and an interactive Q&A session featuring:

– Hanae Hanzawa – Human Rights Officer, United Nations Human Rights (OHCHR)
– Evan Wiseman – Climate Policy Manager, The Atmospheric Fund (TAF)
– Dr. Yao (Adam) Liu – Assistant Professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
– Dr. Joseph McQuade – Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian Institute, University of Toronto

DAY 2 | January 29, 2021 | 10:00 am – 11 :45 am

The second day of the conference features opening remarks by Professor Francis Cody (Director, Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies) and a Business, Arts & Media industry panel with presentations and an interactive Q&A session featuring:

– Anastasia Belashov – International Travel Trade Manager, Niagara Falls Tourism
– Jay Qin – Principal at Sard Verbinnen & Co
– Atif Khan – Program Manager, Coordinator at Reel Asian International Film Festival

* Follow the link below (bottom of the page) to view the full program or copy/paste the following link in your web browser address bar: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/files/2021/01/Global-Careers-program-2021.pdf

____________________________

HANAE HANZAWA is a Human Rights Officer at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Hanae graduated with an MA in Women and Gender Studies and Collaborative Program in Asia-Pacific Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently working at the Regional Office for South-East Asia of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bangkok, Thailand. Hanae’s previous experiences include working at various NPOs, the Asia-Europe Foundation, and UNICEF in Canada, Singapore, and Cambodia in the areas of human rights mainstreaming, child protection, torture prevention, HIV/AIDS, and mental health and addiction.

EVAN WISEMAN is a Climate Policy Manager of The Atmospheric Fund (TAF). Evan leads TAF’s policy and advocacy work. He has worked for elected officials provincially and federally, and for a government relations firm in Ottawa. Outside of the world of politics, Evan has worked for the Ontario Centres of Excellence supporting its innovation agenda, and as a researcher at the University of Toronto. Evan holds a Master’s degree in History with the Collaborative Program in Asia-Pacific Studies from the Asian Institute, as well as an Honours Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from the University of Toronto.

DR. ADAM LIU is an Assistant Professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Adam Liu is a political scientist trained at Stanford University, though he doesn’t believe in disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Three broad questions intrigue him at the moment: The political foundations of markets in autocracies; the economic effects of political tensions between nations; and the spatial organization of coercive institutions in autocracies. His dissertation, “Building Markets within Authoritarian Institutions: The Political Economy of Banking Development in China,” won the 2020 BRICS Economic Research Award.

DR. JOSEPH MCQUADE is the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief at the NATO Association of Canada and Digital Content Manager for the Munk School’s Belt and Road in Global Perspective research initiative. Dr. McQuade is affiliated with the Queen’s University Global History Initiative and with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, and is a Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.

JAY QIN is a Principal at Sard Verbinnen & Co. Prior to joining Sard Verbinnen & Co, Jay was a transactional lawyer with two leading UK international law firms. In his near-decade of legal experience, Jay has advised a variety of clients, including those in the technology, venture capital, private equity, retail, and manufacturing sectors. Jay graduated with honours from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor’s in Economics, and a Master’s in East Asian Studies with the Collaborative Program Asia-Pacific Studies at the Munk School’s Asian Institute. He also holds a Juris Doctor and Postgraduate Certificate in Laws from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

ANASTASIA BELASHOV is an International Travel Trade Manager at Niagara Falls Tourism. Anastasia’s academic training includes a bachelor’s degree in Asia Pacific Studies, Tel Aviv University (Israel), a Master’s degree in Asia Pacific Studies; Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy; two years of Research Study at the Faculty of Letters, Hokkaido University; and a Certificate in Tourism and Environment at Brock University. Anastasia’s work at Niagara Falls Tourism involves promotion and marketing of Niagara’s attractions, hotels, restaurants, venues, and other assets to international inbound markets through travel trade channels.

ATIF KHAN is a Graduate Student at the University of Toronto, an Interdisciplinary Artist and a Program Manager at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. Atif Khan is a researcher, writer, and artist exploring text, image, and curatorial practice. His research-driven practice intersects key themes of war, surveillance, human death, and visual studies. Broadly, he thinks through how the word “violence” is assembled and given power in the material world by connecting objects, language, words, meaning, and a specific set of archives. Khan’s current research investigates militarized drone system operations across the United States, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He is completing an MA in Human Geography and South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.