Description

While scientific inquiry is often expected to be free from ideological interference, religiosity has become a feature in Indonesian higher education. In this paper, we explore the formation of scholars’ identity in terms of religious orientation. We show that many student groups in Indonesia have made it a mission to raise religious consciousness and experiences on campus. Over the last 20 years, there are significant tensions between managing students’ exposure to religiously conservative efforts, maintaining religious tolerance, and balancing these elements with religious freedom and association. These questions are important because they determine the kinds of identities and organizational forms that students contribute to nation-building projects.

Teti A. Argo is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Bandung Institute of Technology – Indonesia. Her research on religious conservatism in universities is a part of a larger research dedicated to looking at the role of higher education and nation building.

Frans A. Prasetyo holds a masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia. He is currently a fellow at the University of Toronto.

Description

This talk is interested in how Korean literary and cultural critics have defined the idea of literature and what roles the idea serves in their larger arguments about the human being and history. It focuses in particular on mid-century Korea, from the late Japanese colonial period until the 1950s. The intention behind this periodization is to recognize both continuity and discontinuity between “before and after liberation,” particularly in relation to concepts of the human and their intersection with imperial, colonial, and national politics. Through texts by Paek Ch’ŏl, Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Sŏ Insik, and An Hamgwang, published in the Japanese empire, South Korea, and North Korea, I will discuss how and why these critics conceived of literature as the most important mediation between transcendental concepts, including moral and political ideas, and the everyday experiences of modernity. This situating of literature between ideas and experience was connected to the figure of the human, the “empirico-transcendental doublet” of modernity (Foucault), and thereby to modes of governmentality between Japanese empire, US and Soviet occupation, and the Korean national population. This talk comes out of a current book project, a collection of translations titled Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism.

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). He has published articles in journals such as PMLA and positions and book chapters in volumes such as The Korean Popular Culture Reader and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. He is currently working on a collection of translations, Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism and a book manuscript, Political Moods: Melodrama and the Cold War in Korean Film.

Description

Featuring presentations from the Asian Institute’s 2018-19 RICHARD CHARLES LEE INSIGHTS THROUGH ASIA CHALLENGE (ITAC) & BIG IDEAS COMPETITION: EXPLORING GLOBAL TAIWAN Student Research Awardees

Event Program

12:00-1:15PM
Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC) Presentations

Yujuan (Emmy) Fu, Ethics, Society & Law; Literature & Critical Theory
Jennifer Han, Peace, Conflict & Justice and Political Science
Sites of (Un)belonging: Spaces/Faces of Honjok Youth in Seoul, South Korea

Amrita Kumar-Ratta, MGA, PhD Student, Department of Geography and Planning
Shades of Brown Girl: The Many Colours of Transnational South Asian Femininity

Katie Kwang, Psychology; Economics
Benita Leong, History; Political Science (UTM)
Hui Wen Zheng, Contemporary Asian Studies; Peace, Conflict, and Justice
Moving in and moving out: understanding the effects of social exclusion on the mental health of rural-urban migrants in Shenzhen

Zixian Liu, PhD Candidate, Department of History
Rural Land Marketization, the Displacement of the Urban Poor and the Neoliberalizing Developmental State in Beijing

Habiba Maher
Aliza Rahman
Asian Modest Fashion in the Museum Space

Minh Anh (Mia) Nguyen, Contemporary Asian Studies; Political Science
Unwanted Children

Man (Angela) Xu, Sociology Department
The Invisible Hand of South-South Globalization: A Study of Chinese Migrants in Tehran

1:15-1:45PM
Lunch Break

1:45-3:00PM
Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan Presentations

Adam Zivokinovic (“Zivo”) – Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
Ji Chen (Tony) Yin – Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
The Referendum

Anson Au, Department of Sociology; Department of Chinese Literature (Joint Appointment), National Sun Yat-Sen University
The Everyday Politics of LGBTQ Minorities in Taiwan: Discrimination, Legalization, and Community

Sabrina Teng-io Chung, PhD, East Asian Studies
Exhibiting In-Justices: Human Rights Discourses in Taiwan’s Recent Redress Efforts

Yiwei Jin, MA student, Department of Political Science
Hsieh-Piao and the Politics of Personalization in Taiwan

Niki C Yang, Criminology
Celina B. Servanez, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies (graduate department)
Sohrab Naderi, Political Science and Criminology
Anti-Death Penalty Efforts in Taiwan

3:00-4:00PM
Reception

About the Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC)
The Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC) is an interdisciplinary experiential learning program at the Asian Institute that offers students the opportunity for an academically rooted, life-changing field research experience in Asia. On the vanguard of supporting the University’s wider goals of internationalization, redesigning undergraduate teaching, and increasing student mobility, ITAC supports students through the complete trajectory of their research, providing workshops on proposal writing, project management, research methods, ethical research practices, and data analysis as well as direct mentoring. Encouraging students to produce their research in various forms ranging from policy reports to documentary films or something else entirely, ITAC is open to undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines, across all three UofT campuses. Out of approximately 100 applications, five to seven research teams are awarded annually by an academic jury. More info: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/rcl-itac/

About the Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan
The Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan is a student research competition, which supports selected undergraduate and graduate student teams to conduct their outstanding research and creative projects in Taiwan. The Competition provides opportunities for student experience in Taiwan by combining research on issues connected to Taiwanese culture/society with travel, taking classroom learning into the field in order to develop academic research skills and self-confidence. The program is enthusiastically interdisciplinary, encouraging student-researchers across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences to collaborate with complementary skills and knowledge bases.

Throughout the winter, awarded teams collectively participated in workshops on project management, research methods, ethical research practices, data analysis, and safety abroad. Teams work closely with an academic mentor and Asian Institute staff, rigorously developing their research projects before departing for field research in the summer semester. Spending up to a month immersed in local cultures, developing cultural fluencies, and conducting research, students return to write up final reports and produce their projects in the late summer.
More info: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/global-taiwan-studies-program-big-ideas-competition/

Description

Over the last ten years, Buddhist monks and activist organisations have played an increasingly visible role in South and Southeast Asia. While not an entirely new phenomenon, this new upsurge appears to have unique and alarming features. These include a growing climate of violence, the increasing use of law and policy in the exclusion of Muslim minorities and the spread of social media and other technologies alternately used to mobilise, educate, communicate and incite. This ‘new Buddhicization’ of political life comes at a time of renewed or continued autocratic and populist tendencies in the politics of Theravada majority countries. Scholars have responded to these trends, but largely without addressing them holistically, institutionally and comparatively.

This interactive and conversation-oriented workshop—led by scholars with expertise in Buddhism, politics and law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand respectively—aims to map out a path forward for researching the ‘new Buddhicization’ of public life in the region. This research programme would seek to identify new patterns, processes and problems that ought to be the focus of scholarship, moving beyond investigations into the motivations and activities of individual monks or groups to ask broader comparative questions about the structural conditions that enable or accelerate the processes described above. We invite colleagues with related interests and expertise to provide feedback on this programme in its early stages.

For example, how are the current dynamics different from previous moments of politicised Buddhism in the region? What trends or patterns can be found in the countries’ legal, political and social systems and how have Buddhist actors worked to influence institutional changes? What historical factors—premodern, colonial, postcolonial, etc.— seem relevant or determinative? What features of Buddhist ecclesiastical organisation and governance enable or discourage the rise of groups like Ma Ba Tha or Bodu Bala Sena? Under what conditions have Buddhist pressure groups been particularly successful (or not) across the Bay of Bengal? Are there key features of Buddhist political philosophy or tropes of Buddhist literature that appear prominently in the speeches given by prominent monks? What new methodologies will be important in considering these new trends? What gaps exist in currently available data that would enable more robust comparisons and analysis over time? What blind spots have been left by existing scholarship?

Tomas Larsson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St John’s College. Tomas has a PhD in Government from Cornell University. He is the author of Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand, published by Cornell University Press in 2012. In recent years his research has increasingly focused on religion and politics, and especially on various aspects of state regulation of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, resulting in a number of publications in journals such as International Political Science Review, Modern Asian Studies, and Journal of Law and Religion.

Benjamin Schonthal is Associate Professor of Buddhism and Asian Religions at the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he is also Associate Dean (International) for the Humanities Division. He received his Ph.D. in the field of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation received the 2013 Law & Society Association Dissertation Award. Ben’s work examines the intersections of religion, law and politics in late-colonial and contemporary Southern Asia, with a particular focus on Buddhism and law in Sri Lanka. His research appears in The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of the American Academy of Religions and other places. Ben is the author of Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2016. His current research project, supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand, looks at the interactions of state law and Buddhist monastic law in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern Asia.

Matthew J. Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar. Matt’s first book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. His articles on Buddhism, ethnicity, politics and political thought in Myanmar have appeared in Politics & Religion, Journal of Burma Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Contemporary Buddhism, Buddhism, Law & Society, and Asian Survey. Matt was P-I for an ESRC-funded 2-year research project entitled “Understanding ‘Buddhist nationalism’ in Myanmar” and was a co-founder of the Myanmar Media and Society project and of the Burma/Myanmar blog Tea Circle.

Description

This lecture examines a form of international relations that arises when emerging states share an inhabited borderland: “state-shadowing”. Authority over people is crucial to effective sovereignty, yet international borderlands are often porous and heterogeneous. Borderlanders have the possibility to look across, observe and compare different state-making and nation-building projects. When neighboring states seek to consolidate in such situations, physical closeness can become a contest to prove their superiority over the state next door—which constitutes an always discernible, readily available, and equally viable alternative political project—to local people. This fear of comparison is particularly high in post-colonial polities like China and India, struggling to transform into nations. The triangular relationship between states and non-state actors in borderland situations turn state-making and nation-building into emulative, mirroring, and competitive attempts at self-definition against the other polity. As China and India’s Himalayan encounter in the 20th century attests, this fear of being compared can escalate into a destructive security dilemma. The concept of state-shadowing thus offers a framework to understand how proximity, mobility and governmentality structure the low politics between neighbouring post-colonial states, and potentially contribute to conflict.

A specialist of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Dr. Guyot-Réchard holds a senior lectureship (associate professorship) in contemporary international history at King’s College London. Her award-winning work focuses on the long-term impact of decolonization, particularly in terms of international politics. She has written extensively on the strategic borderlands between India, China and Burma. More recent work focuses on India’s practice of diplomacy and on South Asia and the international order and on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean since 1945. She regularly intervenes on South Asia-related issues in international media and policy circles.

Description

Coinciding with the current Canadian Federal Election season, the Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union (CASSU) is pleased to host a panel discussion on Asian-Canadian Identity in Canadian Electoral Politics. The event focuses on examining Asian representation in Canadian Electoral Politics, exploring the unique sociopolitical conditions that candidates, politicians, and public servants who identify as of Asian-descent experience when navigating Canadian electoral politics.

Topics of discussion will range from the public perception of Asian-Canadian political leaders in Canada, specific sociopolitical experiences and hurdles that candidates encounter when running for office, and projected shifts in voting behaviour as a result of demographic changes in Canada (i.e. influx of newcomers).

SPEAKERS:
Professor Ludovic Rheault
Ludovic Rheault is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to his appointment as faculty, he joined an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Riverside. Prof. Rheault obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Montreal in 2013.

Professor Rheault’s research interests focus on areas of the Canadian government, and applications of statistical methods to examine public opinions and policy-related questions. As a member of the French-Canadian minority, he will provide examples illustrating the challenges involved with cultural diversity in Canadian federal politics. In addition, Professor Rheault will provide statistical Canadian electoral insights on the topic.

Kuo Yin
Kuo Yin began her career in Canadian politics as a constituency assistant for the Member of Parliament in Toronto. She later held the position of parliamentary assistant at the House of Commons in Ottawa. Prior working in federal politics, Yin studied, worked and lived in Edmonton, Washington D.C and Oxford. According to Yin, “What makes me feel powerful as an Asian woman in Canadian politics is that I was given a variety of opportunities on different platforms to lead this country towards the direction where Canadians want to be.”

Tenzin Sudip Chogkyi
Tenzin Chogkyi was born in Tibet and raised in India. She came to Toronto 15 years ago to study filmmaking. Prior to joining politics, Tenzin worked for the Canadian Oscar nominee, Deepa Mehta.

Over the past 4 years, Tenzin has served as the Community Liaison for MP Arif Virani at the Parkdale-High Park riding. Parkdale is home to the largest Tibetan community outside of India. In addition to her active role at the office, she is also the coordinator for Parliamentary Friends of Tibet Canada Friendship group.

Description

This talk focuses on the dark nights of desire, on the difficulties and ordeals lovers have to face and overcome in the pursuit of fulfilment, and also on the tricks that their ingenuity manages to invent in order to escape detection, which sometimes can lead to disgrace or even death. Indian literature covers both illicit and marital love with great nuance. It ranges from problems to do with secrecy to problems of marital privacy in a crowded extended family situation. The differences between literary representations and visual representations of love stories will also be dealt with.

Dr. Fabrizia Baldissera teaches Sanskrit Language and Literature at University of Florence. She lectures abroad extensively. Her interests are kāvya, satire, Goddess worship, dance, Indian alchemy and Arthaśāstra. Her books include The Narmamālā of Kṣemendra; Śāradātilakabhāṇa; L’universo di Kāma; King and Devī and Emotions in Indian Dramas and Dances.

Description

The talk will be based on my newly published book Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press). The book examines the life of the Sri Lankan Tamil community in the time of war and migration before the war was ended in 2009. Three decades of war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009, but the prolonged violence during the war devastated the Sri Lankan Tamil community, leading to a serious disruption of ordinary life and mass migrations to escape the violence of the state and of Tamil militants. Jaffna Tamils are now widely dispersed across the world – predominantly in Canada, continental Europe, UK, Australia and India. In the book I have focused on marriage processes (arrangements of transnational marriages), transit places where the actual marriage performance takes place, figures (e.g. marriage brokers, photographers) who facilitate marriages, visual documents (e.g. wedding photos), and laws, in order to understand how Sri Lankan Tamils, who have been dispersed across spaces, rebuilt and shaped their fragmented lives and communities through these documents/figures/ spaces/zones. This study suggests that those fragmented communities were rekindled by ‘in-betweens’ associated with the marriage process, actors like wedding photographers or marriage brokers, legal corpuses, and transit places. The practices, ceremonies, and performances during the marriage process hold an imagined and lived future/s, entangled with past and present. This book deals with temporalities, documents, relatedness and political violence.

Sidharthan Maunaguru is currently an assistant professor in anthropology at Department of Sociology and South Asian Studies at National University of Singapore. His research interests cover the areas of marriage, migration, religion, diaspora, politics, conscience, ethics, and law. He was awarded a Newton Fellowship by British Academia and Royal Society which was held at University of Edinburgh before he joined NUS. Maunaguru’s work is placed within the South Asian regions and beyond, it often includes multi-site fieldwork and intersects with anthropology, history and philosophy. He has published in Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies on Society and History, Religion and Society and Contributions to Indian Sociology. Maunaguru’s book titled Marrying for a Future: Transnational Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War is published in 2019 with University of Washington Press, and another of his article is forthcoming in Current Anthropology.

Marrying for a Future: Transnational Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War will be available for purchase at the venue.

Description

Mari Yoshihara spoke about her new book, Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro, which interweaves the history of Leonard Bernstein’s transformation from an American icon to a world maestro with an intimate story of his relationships with two Japanese individuals: Amano Kazuko, a loyal fan who began writing letters to Bernstein in 1947, and Kunihiko Hashimoto, a young man who fell deeply in love with Bernstein in 1979 and later became his business representative. During the period in which these two relationships unfolded, Japan’s place in the world and its relationship vis-à-vis the United States changed dramatically, which in turn shaped Bernstein’s connection to the country. Yoshihara traced the making of a global Bernstein amidst the shifting change of classical music that made this American celebrity turn increasingly to Europe and Japan.   

Mari Yoshihara is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the editor of American Quarterly. Her publications include Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003) and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (2007).  *Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro will be available for purchase at the venue.  

Location The lounge is located on the 14th floor of the Robarts Library. Take the P4 elevator from the 2nd floor of Robarts to the 14th floor. On exiting the elevator, head LEFT and follow signs to EAS.

Description

Prof. Yoshihara, who is the Senior Editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, will offer an informal session about the journal, including advice on submitting an article for publication.

Mari Yoshihara is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the editor of American Quarterly. Her publications include Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003) and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (2007).

Description

Through the interrogation rooms of the Korean War, this talk demonstrates how the individual human subject became both the terrain and the jus ad bellum for this critical U.S. war of ‘intervention’ in postcolonial Korea. In 1952, with the US introduction of voluntary POW repatriation proposal at Panmunjom, the interrogation room and the POW became a flashpoint for an international controversy ultimately about postcolonial sovereignty and political recognition.

The ambitions of empire, revolution and non-alignment converged upon this intimate encounter of military warfare: the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner of war. Which state could supposedly reinvent the most intimate power relation between the colonizer and the colonized, to transform the relationship between the state and subject into one of liberation, democracy or freedom? Tracing two generations of people across the Pacific as they navigate multiple kinds of interrogation from the 1940s and 1950s, this talk lay outs a landscape of interrogation – a dense network of violence, bureaucracy, and migration – that breaks apart the usual temporal bounds of the Korean War as a discrete event.

Monica Kim is Assistant Professor in U.S. and the World History in the Department of History at New York University. Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press), is a trans-Pacific history of decolonization told through the experiences of two generations of people creating and navigating military interrogation rooms of the Korean War. She has published work in journals such as Critical Asian Studiesand positions: asia critiqueconcerning U.S. empire, war-making, and decolonization. She is also a member of the Editorial Collective for Radical History Review. Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Penn Humanities Forum at University of Pennsylvania, and the Korea Foundation.

*Copies of “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History” will be available for sale during this event.

Description

The Street Food research project aims at investigating some challenges posed by street food vending, drawing upon 4 case studies: Bangkok, Hanoi, Chicago and Montpellier. This paper will present the cases of Hanoi and Bangkok. In Bangkok, street food is an affordable and easily accessible source of food throughout the city: thus, it contributes to securing the access to food (in terms of availability and affordability), while often providing income to underprivileged households, in particular migrants. Yet, street vendors are currently facing a vehement eviction process, in order to facilitate the traffic. Hanoi follows the same pattern, although moderately, and shut down several informal markets, for food safety reasons. But what are the consequences of this eviction for vendors and for the food system? How do vendors and consumers adapt to this changing urban environment? Moreover, how do planners consider the food issue within urban planning?

Dr. Gwenn Pulliat is a researcher in geography at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She has worked on Southeast Asia for a decade, with a focus on urban development issues. Her research deals with urban food security and the urban environment. In 2017, she has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, working on the Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia partnership.

Description

This case study of Nepali literature shows how literature can reflect the expanding spheres of knowledge in societies like that of Nepal where multiple cultural modes prevail. I will present a study on the expanding sphere of Nepali literature in areas such as the choice of subject for writing, the growth of ‘print capitalism’ or printing and dissemination from the last decades of the 19th century, the role of literary journals in keeping up the creative and free spirit under the autocratic regimes, and the creation of the reading public. The presentation will show how in the first half of the twentieth century did Nepali poetry use romanticism as the important literary trend, and how the literary writers, critics and academics see and interpret modernism, and people understand it in common parlance. I will mention my own experience as a playwright in the selection of the motifs for the plays and how that reflects the sphere of creative writing, in terms of cultural diversity and plurality of subjects.

Abhi Subedi (PhD) received his higher education in Nepal and Britain. He is an essayist, literary critic, linguist, playwright, and poet. He has over two-dozen books on different subjects to his credit. Professor Subedi has taught since 1970. He writes on issues of freedom, culture, literature, arts and social transformations.

Description

During World War I (WWI), approximately 300 Chinese soldiers enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force despite rampant anti-Chinese discrimination. Anonymous until recently, Frederick “Freddy” Lee was one of those soldiers.

Born into a Chinese Canadian Merchant family in Kamloops, BC, Freddy volunteered for the war, enlisting with the 172nd Battalion and served in a vital role as a machine gunner. Freddy fought in and survived the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1916, but was later killed in the Battle of Hill 70 in August 1917 at only 21 years of age. He fought and died as a Canadian. Freddy was among the 11,286 Canadians killed in France with no known graves.

Freddy’s story is one that not only symbolizes the strength and determination of Chinese Canadians’ long struggle to gain acceptance as full Canadian citizens, but also embodies the Canadian spirit of “strength in diversity”, where Canadians of all ethnicities contributed to the history and development of their nation.

While featuring Frederick Lee, the symposium will present a larger Chinese Canadian story. Based on historical research by experts on Chinese Canadian studies and WWI, along with invaluable insights from key figures involved in various Frederick Lee projects, the event will shine new light on Chinese Canadians’ contributions to Canadian history.

Please RSVP by emailing events.rclchkl@utoronto.ca, or by calling 416-946-8978.