Description

The sixth annual China Law Conference will bring together scholars and practitioners across North America to address the intersection between Chinese Law and current events. The conference will feature panels on the South China Sea Dispute, Trade and “One Belt One Road” Initiative, and Human Rights and Ethnic Minorities of China. Speakers for the SCS panel are: Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon (University of Toronto), Ted McDorman (University of Victoria), Chris Chung (University of Toronto), and Nong Hong (Institute for China-America Studies). Speakers for the Trade panel are: Thomas S. Axworthy (Massey College), Gil Lan (Ryerson University), Julia Qin (Wayne State University), and Cyndee Todgham Cherniak (LexSage). Speakers for the Human Rights panel are: Alvin Y.H. Cheung (New York University), Masashi Crete-Nishihata (Citizen Lab), Mehmet Tohti (Canadian Uyghur Association), and Louisa Greve (Uyghur Human Rights Project).

Please note that you can either register on the chinalawconference.ca website OR on Eventbrite.

Description

My talk will engage with a set of late works by B. R. Ambedkar—Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India, The Buddha and His Gospel, The Buddha and His Dhamma, and Buddha or Karl Marx—where the analysis of Buddhism’s history in India intersects with Ambedkar’s understanding of “religion” and his philosophy of conversion. My talk returns to a question that haunts Ambedkar scholarship. This concerns the issue of how to understand Buddhist conversion within the complexly ramified temporalities of “return” and (Marxist) “revolution” that frames the project of human emancipation for B. R. Ambedkar.

Anupama Rao is Senior Editor, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and Acting Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Rao has written widely on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Her book, The Caste Question (University of California Press, 2009) theorized caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation.

She is currently working on a book on the political thought of B. R. Ambedkar; and a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay. Her most recent book, the edited volume Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality was published in December 2017.

Her work has been supported by grants from the ACLS; the American Institute for Indian Studies; the Mellon Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the SSRC. She was a Fellow-in-Residence at the National Humanities Center from 2008-09, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford during 2010-11. She was a Fellow at REWORK (Humboldt University, Berlin) in 2014-2015.

Description

From the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines to Myanmar’s military dictatorship, Southeast Asia is home to several fascinating cases of authoritarianism and populism. Efforts to combat corruption and drug trafficking have become authoritarian mechanisms through which to crack down on dissent and tighten the state’s stronghold on civil societies. Do such observations point to a recent resurgence of historical trends, or are we witnessing new forms of populism and authoritarianism in the 21st century? What are the political and socio-economic factors that give rise to and sustain populism in Southeast Asia? How is authoritarianism in Southeast Asia different from, or similar to, centralized governance in other parts of the world?

We are honoured and excited to welcome three distinguished panelists to our event:

Professor Arne Kislenko (Associate Professor of History, Ryerson University; Trinity College, University of Toronto) will discuss the regression in Thailand witnessed with the return of military government and a new king. He will also speak to the entrenchment of authoritarianism in Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar/Burma. Our second panelist Petra Molnar (Research Associate. International Human Rights Program, University of Toronto Faculty of Law) will be discussing her fact-finding trip to the Philippines in 2018, the impacts of the drug war, and more generally about human rights advocacy. Our third panelist, Irene Poetranto (PhD candidate, Department of Political Science & Research at the Citizen Lab) will be commenting on the digital/cyber component of populism and authoritarianism, for example, Duterte’s use of social media.

Description

The Dr. David Chu Scholarships in Asia-Pacific Studies offer funding to undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Toronto who are pursuing study and research related to the Asia-Pacific region (East and Southeast Asia). These awards are administered by the Faculty of Arts and Science with an application deadline of March 15. Learn more about the awards and how to apply through the Faculty of Arts and Science Website.

The information session features Professor Takashi Fujitani, Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, who will provide an overview of the award selection criteria and eligibility and how to build a strong proposal. Representatives from the Faculty of Arts and Science, School of Graduate Studies, and Asian Institute will also be available to help students in filling out the Financial Need Assessment form and answer questions about the application process.

Description

Abstract:
It is recognized that the military coups in Thailand in 2006 and 2014 were the orchestrated attempts of the anti-democratic alliance of the old powers against the rise of electoral politics. After the coups, they have tried to establish firm control through various measures, including the constitutions of 2007 and 2017 and strengthening the bureaucracy. However, little attention has been paid to the Thai military’s expansive civil affairs projects, including rural and urban development programs, mass organizations and mobilization campaigns, ideological and psychological programs. Puangthong argues that the Thai military has always paid great importance to its civil affairs projects as a political offensive to control popular politics since the counter-insurgency period. The conservatives craftily manipulated legal and moral legitimacy in order to protect and expand the army’s role beyond its combatant sphere. The entrenchment has been more apparent and aggressive since the 2006 coup. Old apparatuses were reactivated and new ones were created. Power of the army over other state agencies increased more than ever. On one hand, the military’s civil affairs projects allow the military and conservative elites to dictate the country’s long-term political direction. This potent tool, on other hand, effectively polarizes the populace deeper and thus makes democratization in the future difficult.

Biography:
Puangthong R. Pawakapan is Associate Professor of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute, Harvard University, 2018-2019. Her recent works include “The Central Role of Thailand’s Internal Security Operations Command in the Post-Counter-insurgency Period,” Trends in Southeast Asia (ISEAS: Singapore 2017); “The Foreign Press’ Changing Perceptions of Thailand’s Monarchy.” Trends in Southeast Asia. (2015); State and Uncivil Society in Thailand at the Temple of Preah Vihear, (2013).

Description

Join the Centre for the Study of Korea in a celebration of Dr. Sherry Yu’s book “Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles.” Dr. Yu will be joined by Dr. Karim Karim who will be the discussant for the event.

Sherry S. Yu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Karim H. Karim is a Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication and the Director of the Carleton Centre for the Study of Islam at Carleton University. He is also an Associate of Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Centre for European Studies at Carleton University.

Coffee and refreshments available at event.

Description

This symposium brough together a distinguished group of scholars whose work either frames contemporary global assessments of the state of democracy around the world or focuses attention directly on the political struggle now underway between democracy and authoritarianism across the Asian region. Its purpose was to bring current comparative research on the evolution of democratic institutions and practices of government into dialogue with cutting-edge conceptual work on democracy and democratization.  The participants together addressed the challenge of maintaining domestic and international stability when countries are facing competing political imperatives generated both by globalizing capitalism and by the contemporary diffusion of systemic power.  

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM  

 2:10-2:15PM

Welcoming Remarks RANDALL HANSEN Interim Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy  Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto        

2:15-4:00PM                

Panel I LUCAN AHMAD WAY Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto  Are we actually in the Midst of a Democratic Recession?  SEVA GUNITSKY Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Great Powers and the Future of Democracy  LYNETTE ONG Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Asian Institute, University of Toronto Studying "China in the World" in 2019  PHILLIP LIPSCY Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Stanford University  Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Democracy, Financial Crises, and Economic Volatility  MAIKO ICHIHARA Associate Professor, Graduate School of Law and the School of International and Public Policy, Hitotsubashi University, Japan Understanding Japan’s International Democracy Assistance Policy  Chair: LOUIS PAULY Interim Director, Centre for the Study of Global Japan J. Stefan Dupré Distinguished Professor of Political Economy, Department of Political Science  Discussant: DAVID A. WELCH University Research Chair and Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of International Affairs    

4:00-4:15PM                         

Panel II  YUSUKE TAKAGI Assistant Professor, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan Democracy in Asia: The Case of the Philippines  JOSEPH WONG Professor, Department of Political Science  Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation, Munk School  Associate Vice-President and Vice-Provost, International Student Experience, University of Toronto Japan: Asia’s First Unlikely Democracy  DAN SLATER Professor of Political Science Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies  Director, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED), University of Michigan Indonesia: Asia’s Newest Unlikely Democracy  SANG-YOUNG RHYU Professor, Political Economy, Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea Upgrading Democracy in Korea: Resilient Consolidation and Complex Challenges  DIANA FU Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto State Control in China under Xi Jinping  Chair: LOUIS PAULY Interim Director, Centre for the Study of Global Japan J. Stefan Dupré Distinguished Professor of Political Economy, Department of Political Science  Discussant: DAVID A. WELCH University Research Chair and Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of International Affairs   

5:55-6:00PM               

Closing Remarks TAKAKO ITO Consul General of Japan in Toronto  

6:00-7:00PM                

Reception

Description

THE INDIA-CANADA ASSOCIATION LECTURE

Prakrit was, along with Sanskrit and Tamil, one of the main languages of literature in premodern South Asia. It flourished in the first half of the first millennium BCE, although it continued to be cultivated for many centuries afterwards. This talk will begin by sketching the historical outlines of this tradition and then explain why it is important to corroborate, elaborate, and reflect upon its history. First, Prakrit textuality was closely connected to broader developments in the religious and expressive literatures of South Asia, and gives us a unique perspective onto those developments. Second, the many ways in which Prakrit texts defy being ‘historicized’—verses that slip in and out of anthologies, stories told again and again, works that survive only in fragments or abridgements—actually tell us something important about the historical being of literary texts.

Andrew Ollett is a Junior Fellow at Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. He works on the literary and intellectual traditions of premodern South Asia.

Description

During the Korean civil war, thousands of real and imagined “leftists” were massacred by the emerging South Korean state. In the wake of South Korea’s long process of post-authoritarian transitional justice, the nature of many of these atrocities has to come to light, in turn leading to increased interest from South Korean and international scholars. This talk builds upon this research by focusing on the role that the family structure played in determining the targets and methods of the perpetrators. Drawing on Elisa Von Joeden-Forgey’s concept of “life force atrocities,” I discuss the ways in which counter-insurgency forces incorporated the decimation the family unit as part of the broader process of anti-leftist liquidation. This pattern was continued into the post-war years, as survivors and families of accused “leftists” were denied the right to properly mourn and placed under the “guilt by association system”. I argue that this process of systematic persecution gave rise to novel forms of communal identities, anchored around the notion of the collective bereaved family. This, in turn, led to unique forms of political resistance in the 1960-1961 period.

Dr Wright is currently the Korea Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2016. He is currently working on completing his manuscript “Civil War, Politicide, and the Politics of Memory in South Korea, 1948-1961”. His work has been published in Cross Currents, The Asia Pacific Journal, and by Routledge.

Description

The invention of identification technologies is deeply connected with the surveillance of colonial populations. Fingerprinting, the forerunner of biometrics, was created by the British police in colonial India in 1897, and was also employed in Manchuria and Northeast China under Japanese occupation from the 1920’s to 1945. Why did fingerprint identification attract the Japanese imperialist power, and how effectively was it practiced? We examine narratives surrounding the Japanese identification systems in Manchuria, especially regarding Chinese workers who were placed under severe surveillance, and discuss how a similar scheme survived the lost war and was actually legitimated in post-World War Ⅱ Japan. The expansion and transformation of biometric power can be seen in the Japanese government’s repeated attempts to establish “perfect” identification systems. Surveillance has spread from ex-colonial populations to foreign workers and to citizens, culminating in recent legislative changes concerning enhanced technologies.

ASAKO TAKANO is an Associate Professor at Meiji Pharmaceutical University in Tokyo, Japan. She received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences from Hitotsubashi University, and published her book in Japan in 2016, Fingerprints and Modernity.

MIDORI OGASAWARA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University, and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa. She conducted field research in China to investigate the Chinese experiences of Japanese colonial identification systems and obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from Queen’s in 2018.

Description

Please use the registration button above to sign up for the lecture on March 22. To sign up for a reading on March 23, please click here to register on Eventbrite.

This two-day event brings together international scholars and critics to explore the complexity, dynamism, and significance of Manila within and beyond Asia. As a city that has experienced the multiple vestiges of empire, the disciplinary machinations of dictatorial rule, the effects an infamous “war on drugs”, and the continued realities of uneven resource distribution, Manila serves as a productive physical and ideological space to explore the dialogic nature of beauty and brutality—as these concepts intertwine in the urban repertoires of the global south. On March 22, speakers will reflect on how Manila influences their work as diasporic critics scholars. On March 23, renowned Filipino American author Jessica Hagedorn will have her Toronto debut and read from her most famous works. She will also converse with Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA), discussing her thoughts on the city, and Manila, as an imaginative space for her artistry and craft. Books can be purchased at the venue, in collaboration with Another Story Bookshop.

FRIDAY, MARCH 22
108N – NORTH HOUSE, MUNK SCHOOL OF GLOBAL AFFAIRS AND PUBLIC POLICY,
1 DEVONSHIRE PLACE
Program:
9:30 AM – 10:00 AM – Welcoming Remarks
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM – Dialogue 1: Sensing the City
SPEAKERS: Ferdinand Lopez (Toronto); Gary Devilles (Ateneo De Manila); Paul Nadal (Princeton); Genevieve Clutario (Harvard)
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – Lunch
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM – Dialogue 2: Intimacies and the City
SPEAKERS: Robert Diaz (Toronto); Denise Cruz (Columbia); Martin Manalansan (Minnesota); Christine Balance (Cornell); Allan Isaac (Rutgers)

***********************
SATURDAY, MARCH 23
NEXUS LOUNGE, 12TH FLOOR, OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), 252 BLOOR ST. W.
A Reading with Noted Author Jessica Hagedorn, in Conversation with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (UCLA)
Program:
4:00 PM – 4:10 PM – Welcoming Remarks
4:10 PM – 4:30 PM – Performance by Patrick Salvani
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM – Reading with Jessica Hagedorn, and Conversation with Lucy Burns (UCLA)

Description

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of university students, labor activists, civil rights lawyers, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among young Chinese women. Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, Hong Fincher describes how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.

Dr. Leta Hong Fincher is a journalist, scholar and author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso 2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek and others. She is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing. She also has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Harvard University. Her first book was the critically acclaimed Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed 2014).

* Dr. Fincher’s book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China will be available for purchase at the venue.*

Description

Abstract:

Based on Robert Kramm’s book Sanitized Sex, the talk will discuss the various attempts to sanitize sexuality through the regulation of prostitution, venereal disease and intimacy in occupied Japan after World War II. It features sexuality as key element in issues of security, health and morale during the occupation period. In doing so it underscores how the sanitization of sex was a male-dominated struggle for control and authority in the clash of two competing patriarchal, imperial powers: Japan and the United States. That said, the talk is more than a study of the postwar sexual encounters. An analysis of sex, its regulation and negotiation between occupiers and occupied sheds new light on the everyday experiences and asymmetries of power in occupied Japan, the legacies of the Japanese Empire, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism in the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region.

Robert Kramm is a post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and is affiliated with the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He holds a doctoral degree in history from ETH Zurich and received his B.A. and M.A., also in history, from the University of Erfurt.

Description

What are the current trends in internet control in China and Southeast Asia? How has increasing state control over the internet impacted human rights and civil liberties in the region? What implications do such trends hold for Canada?

As a fast-growing region with increasing ties to Canada, issues of technology, security, privacy and surveillance across Asia cannot be ignored. From increasing threats to press freedom in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte to the broad monitoring of telecommunications in Singapore, Southeast Asia is home to numerous examples of state control over the internet, media, and speech at large. Such a discussion would be incomplete without considering China, where the Communist regime continues to tighten its grip on information flow across cyberspace. And with the recent Sino-Canadian dispute over the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, the presence of Chinese cybertechnology in Canada and the intersection between cybertechnology issues and the Asia-Pacific at large have been thrust to the forefront of socio-political discourse in our country.

Irene Poetranto is a Senior Researcher for the Citizen Lab and a Doctoral Student in Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interest is on the cybersecurity policy development in the Global South, especially in Asia. Her dissertation project focuses on the issue of Internet controls in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. She obtained her Master’s degree in Political Science and Asia-Pacific Studies from the University of Toronto, and Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.

Lotus Ruan is a researcher at The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the interplay of the state and private companies in terms of internet management and innovation in the digital age with an area focus on China. Prior to joining University of Toronto, Lotus received her master’s degree in Asia Pacific Policy Studies at the University of British Columbia and worked as a journalist and news editor in China for over two years.

Description

A multisite church is a single church that meets at multiple locations, often through the use of audio, projection, and even hologram technologies. Nearly all megachurches in the world have adopted this franchise-like form in the last decade, but this fairly new organizational practice originated in South Korea in the 1970s. This talk draws upon transnational ethnographic research at two of the first multisite churches in the world: Yoido Full Gospel Church and Onnuri Church. Following the speaker’s participant-observation on production technology teams at these churches, this talk illustrates Christian efforts to create and maintain “holy infrastructures” [kŏrukhan inp’ŭra] through one’s body, actions, and the objects of one’s practice. Ultimately, this talk asks how one might imagine ethics and pursue the good life in a world permeated by often unseen networks of contact and communion, conscription and contagion.

Heather Mellquist Lehto is a cultural anthropologist who studies religion, technology, and social relations. She is currently a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and she holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in religious studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her first book manuscript, Holy Infrastructure: The Multisite Church Revolution in South Korea and the United States draws on two years of multisited ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles to explore the coordination of technological and religious innovation in some of the world’s first and largest multisite churches.

Description

THE ANNUAL BENGAL STUDIES LECTURE

Once considered the “primordial source of all books” and a proxy for the Qurʾān itself, the Persian and Bengali versions of theNūrnāma (Book of Light) virtually disappeared from the religious landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and West Bengal. The Book of Light narrates the creation of the world by God through the body of the Muḥammad of light. This creation story played a key role in shaping the popular understanding of Islamic cosmology, language, and the significance of the written word in Bengali Islam. With this lecture, I will address the topic of vernacular literacy and multilingualism in Bengal between the 17th and 19th century through the study of the Nūrnāma tradition. A fresh look at the textual tradition that surrounded the transmission of this creation story reveals ways to conceive of vernacular Islam beyond categories of elite vs. popular, or orthodox vs. heterodox.

Thibaut d’Hubert is associate professor in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) at the University of Chicago. He published several articles in periodicals and collective volumes, and contributed entries on Bengal for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam, THREE. In his book titled In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), d’Hubert studies the encounter of Persian, Sanskrit, and vernacular poetics in the courtly milieu of the frontier region between today’s Bangladesh and Myanmar. He is also the co-editor with Alexandre Papas of the volume Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca. 9th/15th-14th/20th (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Reception to follow

*In the Shade of the Golden Palace by Thibaut d’Hubert will be available for purchase at the venue.*

Description

Innovation is the source of sustainable competitive advantage for firms. Innovation itself has been argued to stem from control of valuable and non-imitable resources. As the pace of technology change has increased, however, firms find that resources or resulting innovations fail to secure sustained competitive advantage. Drawing upon field research on contract manufacturers in China, this talk will discuss how resource-constrained SMEs develop different categories of innovations and their impacts on firm organization and performance.

Michael Murphree is assistant professor of international business at the University of South Carolina and is currently a visiting professor with the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto. Professor Murphree is currently working with the Innovation Policy Lab on a study of knowledge transfer, innovation, entrepreneurship, economic growth and employment in the offshore petroleum industry in Newfoundland and Labrador. His primary research interests include globalization, innovation in emerging economies, technology standards and market formation, and intellectual property rights. His research considers China in comparative perspective with other emerging economies and the developed West, particularly Europe. His other research interests are globalization, state-firm relations, innovation, technology standards and market formation, and intellectual property rights, especially in China and East Asia. He has conducted field research in China since 2007 and speaks fluent Mandarin. Professor Murphree has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as a book, chapters in edited volumes and numerous commissioned reports for groups including the Global Commission on Internet Governance and the U.S. National Academies.

Description

This talk discusses the rapid emergence of ban damunhwa (“anti-multiculture”) or the sentiment of anti-immigration in South Korea. Ban damunhwa discourse centers on a variety of issues such as the state’s multicultural policy, crimes by foreigners and problems of the so-called “illegal sojourners” and has been most active and visible on the Internet especially since the mid-2000s. In this talk, I specifically focus on the way ban damunhwa defines the state’s multicultural policy as what gives special preferences to migrants, which, in turn, is said to destroy the livelihoods of the nationals. Represented as “voices of ordinary citizens,” ban damunhwa narratives appeal to, not nationalist or racist sentiments, but rather a neoliberal commonsense of fairness and equity, under which migrants emerge as demonic free-riders. I show how ban damunhwa not only serves as a symptom of a neoliberal ethic but also mirrors the dilemma of the people who struggle under neoliberal system of precarity and yet persist it by reproducing its main ideologies.

EuyRyung Jun is assistant professor of anthropology at Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, South Korea. Jun primarily works on migration, multiculturalism, right-wing populism, and biopolitics and animal discourse. She has published articles in FOCAAL, Positions, Anthropological Quarterly, Kyeongje wa Sahoe [Economy and Society], and Hanguk Munhwa Inryuhak [Korean Cultural Anthropology]. She also writes for Kyunghyang Shinmun, a major newspaper in South Korea, on animal issues.

Description

“First, it was just tech people. Now, literally everyone is interested in Bitcoin,” said New York Times while reporting on the Bitcoin mania that haunted South Korean society in the winter of 2017-2018. In this talk, I take this collective effervescence as an entry point to explore the “magical” features of contemporary financial capitalism. Drawing upon an ethnographic research on a South Korean Bitcoin investor online community, I first examine how the logics of uncertainty and luck are found at the heart of casino capitalism and how lay investors deal with the ambiguous future and luck in their everyday practices. In analogizing their logic and practices with those of gamblers, I illuminate how the emerging mass investment culture exhibits the religious and magical understanding of the world based on self-fulfilling “performativity” and what André Orléan calls “collective belief.” In consequence, this talk seeks to situate the Bitcoin frenzy and its mass investment culture within the broader transformation of human condition with the triumphant rise of financial capitalism. 

Seung Cheol LEE is an assistant professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at the University of Mississippi. 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 the formation of mass investment culture in South Korea in the context of its post-developmental and post-work transition. 

Description

Dr. Cheng Li is Director and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. Dr. Li is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Committee of 100, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He is the author/editor of numerous books, including Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform (1997), China’s Leaders: The New Generation (2001), Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: The Sino-US Educational Exchange (2005), China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (2008), China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation (2010), China’s Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives (2014), Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership (2016), and The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China (2017).He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Dr. Li has advised a wide range of US government, education, research, business and not-for-profit organizations on work in China and has frequently been called upon to share his unique perspective and insights on China, appearing on BBC, CCTV, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, ABC World News, NPR, PBS and more. Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, he came to the United States and later received an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of California and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Princeton University.

Description

We are now into the third year of implementation of a new law and framework for Chinese security governance of overseas NGOs, foundations and thinktanks in China — which already has one of the largest and most rapidly growing NGO and charitable communities in the world. This presentation analyzes these important policy and regulatory shifts in China in control and monitoring of the overseas NGO, foundation and thinktank sector, including the recent detention of a Canadian citizen in which this new framework has been mentioned, and draws some conclusions about the future work of these organizations in China.

Mark Sidel is Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and consultant for Asia at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL). He was part of the team that opened the Ford Foundation office in Beijing in the late 1980s, has consulted widely with international donors and NGOs in China, including the Ford, Gates, Asia and other foundations, and has worked in China since 1972. He writes and speaks frequently on the nonprofit sector and philanthropy in China, India, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Asia.

Description

Vibrant colors and pulsating sounds of religious devotion punctuate the streets and gullies of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Among the Valley’s Newar Buddhist community, art and ritual work in concert to make the divine present in the urban landscape of the city. For Newar Buddhists, art and ritual performance reinforce core philosophical principles and cultural ideals related to sacred space and ritual cosmology. This lecture examines the role of festivals and image processions in manifesting the divine in the city of Patan. The vibrant ritual festivities and artistic traditions build layers of sacred geography and Buddhist cosmology into the streets and courtyards of the city spaces. Thus, this lecture explores the creation of sacred space in the city of Patan through festivals and other celebrations to examine how the Newar Buddhist community navigates the diversity of religious experience in the Kathmandu Valley to ultimately reaffirm their own religious identity.

Kerry Lucinda Brown, Professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design, is a specialist in South Asian and Himalayan art. Her research explores the relationship between art and religious identity in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, situating Newar Buddhist art within the larger context of South Asian Buddhist heritage.

Description

Joseph McQuade is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute’s Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with a dissertation that examined the origins of terrorism in colonial South Asia in international perspective. This research is currently being revised into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Anti-colonial nationalism and the birth of ‘terrorism’ in colonial India, 1857-1947. His postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto will interrogate the role of terrorism and insurgency in defining national identity in postcolonial India and Burma (Myanmar). His broader research and teaching interests include critical genealogies of ‘terrorism’ as a political and legal category, the global history of political violence, and the relationship between insurgency and nation-states.

Kanta Murali is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include comparative political economy of development, Indian politics, politics of growth and economic policy, state-business relations and labor policy. Her Ph.D. dissertation (“Economic Liberalization, Electoral Coalitions and Private Investment in India”) at Princeton University aims to understand the political conditions favourable to growth-oriented policies in poor democracies by focusing on a specific empirical puzzle related to India. It examines sub-national policy variation in the competition for private investment in India after the country undertook market reforms in 1991 and analyzes the political factors behind why some subnational governments have been more pro-active in undertaking investment promotion policies than their counterparts.

Jaby Mathew is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto. Mathew received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto and he is currently revising his doctoral dissertation “Representation in the Shadow of Colonialism: Conceptions of Political Representation in 19th and 20th Century India” into a book manuscript. Mathew’s research focuses on modern Indian thought, contemporary democratic theory, and postcolonial theory with particular attention to the ethics of comparison and translation.

Christoph Emmrich is Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Asian Institute; Associate Professor for South and Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department for Historical Studies and is Chair of the UofT/McMaster Numata Buddhist Studies Program. His research bridges Southeast and South Asia as it engages with fields as diverse as Burmese and Nepalese Buddhism, and Tamil Jainism.

Description

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Internet companies applied their online knowledge to the analogue world for the first time. Facebook, Palantir, Microsoft and Google tried to impress the business elite with three-storey-high temporary buildings at the most central spots in Davos, and Google revealed its ambition to build an entire suburb of Toronto.

In this talk Von Borries argues that Google’s “Sidewalk City Lab” applies reinforced learning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to the real world. (Similar approaches can be observed at Microsoft’s CityNext, Baidou AI City Xiongang, Moscow, Taipei and Singapore Smart Nation, and it is only a question of time until Facebook and Tencent will join in.) This has implications not only for architecture as a creative handcraft, but more importantly for the relationship between people (especially minorities, notoriously overlooked by code based on statistics), as well as social relations, and the private sector.

In this new setting, city planning and architectural design are sourced through machine learning algorithms fed by the big data collected from anyone involved— be they future tenants or critics—potentially any user of Google’s services, in the case of Toronto. Ultimately, we all become unconscious architects as our digital lives are exploited as data. Still, for some time, the results will be unpredictable, even for Google’s coders. It remains to be seen if this can be interpreted as an opportunity or as a failure.

The Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying-Chun has another approach to collaboration. He considers architecture and town-planning a collective endeavour and a participatory effort.

Smart city algorithms lead to the disappearance of the architect. This lecture aims to highlight how “Urban Data as Public Space” is actually working and how it is different from supposedly similar developments on China’s New Silk Road. Lanzhou New Area is a rather top-down, centrally planned development, reminiscent of Corbusier’s 90 year-old Plan Voisin for Paris, but pimped up with cinema-city style theme parks. Last but not least, Von Borries will connect this discussion to central Moscow, where urban facades mimic a clichéd Russian-ness for the football World Cup and beyond, combined with facial recognition software for all.

The lecture will be accompanied by excerpts of Christian von Borries’ upcoming social science fiction film AI is the Answer – What was the Question?

Christian von Borries is a musician and film director who was guest professor for architecture at Nuremberg’s Art Academy. He is a visiting professor at the School of Inter-Media Art at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He lives in a self developed green house on top of an old warehouse building in Berlin. His artistic practice can be read in the tradition of the Situationist’s psychogeography. He just cocurated a tech fair in Seoul and Beijing called A BETTER VERSION OF YOU. Together with Andreas Dzialocha, he is AI Unit.