Description

Rebecca Elmhist is a leading feminist political ecologist and human geographer with two decades of research and teaching experience on struggles over environmental governance, migration and social justice in the global South. Her work explores new ways to rethink feminist political ecology by linking theories associated with material feminism to empirical work on mobility, environmental change and gender in Southeast Asia.

All are welcome!

This event is presented as part of the Ecologies on the Edge programme by the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and the York Centre for Asian Research and the Graduate Programme in Geography at York University.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/171064526946881

More information: ycar@yorku.ca

Description

Abstract:
Palestine/Israel is often described in a sequence of battles or ‘clashes’ regarding ideology, land, violence, economy and international relations. In the media and beyond, these overshadow the everyday experiences of structural or bureaucratic violence. Through a visual tour and narrative presentation, Nadia Abu-Zahra shares her work (completed with Adah Kay) chronicling how millions of Palestinians have been denationalized through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration, blacklisting and a discriminatory legal framework. Based on first-hand accounts and extensive fieldwork, the presentation shows how identity documents continue to be used as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment. The violence of bureaucracy, however, is resisted by Palestinians, Israelis and internationals who refuse to be displaced and divided, to be bound by movement restrictions, and to accept the structural injustice of ‘systematic oppression’ (a term used in international law).

Biography:
Dr. Nadia Abu-Zahra is Associate Professor of International Development and Global Studies and a member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. She also serves on the Reconciliation Committee of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She was previously based at the University of Oxford, and has worked on projects for Oxfam, UNICEF, the European Union, the Open Society Foundation, and Global Affairs Canada. As co-Director of Community Mobilization in Crisis — a project to extend higher education to host and refugee communities through blended/distance learning — her collective efforts have garnered several awards.

Description

Abstract:
Kim Thúy reads from her novel Vi followed by audience Q&A.
CBC News describes Vi as “exploring the lives, loves and struggles of Vietnamese refugees as they reinvent themselves in new lands.”

4:00-5:00: Book signing and reception. The book “Vi” will be available for sale and the author will sign copies. Light refreshments will be served.
5:00-5:30: Break
5:30-7:30: Presentation by Kim Thuy

Bio:
Born in Saigon in 1968, KIM THÚY left Vietnam with the boat people at the age of ten and settled with her family in Quebec. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, restaurant owner, and commentator on radio and television. She lives in Montreal and devotes herself to writing.

Description

The York Centre for Asian Research and the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library are co-presenting the Second Bernard H.K. Luk Memorial Lecture in Hong Kong Studies, titled “Hong Kong and the Gold Mountain Dream” on Thursday, May 10th, 2018 at 4-6PM. This seminar will take place at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library (8th floor, Robarts Library, 130 St. George St, Toronto).

We are pleased to announce that Professor Elizabeth Sinn from the University of Hong Kong and author of Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong will be the keynote speaker for this event. Professor Sinn will be speaking on Hong Kong as an “in-between place” during Chinese migration to California for various opportunities in the latter part of the 19th century. The concept of “in-between places” during migratory periods can also offer a new paradigm for migration studies, which typically only focus on the sending or receiving countries.

Other notable speakers and participants for the event include:

The Honorable Dr. Vivienne Poy, Chancellor Emerita at the U of T and retired Senator of Canada
Miss Florence Tsang, Deputy Director at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (Toronto)
Professor Abidin Kusno, Director at the York Centre for Asian Research
Mr. Larry Alford, Chief Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries
Professor Lisa Mar, Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies at the U of T

This event is free of charge and light refreshments will be provided.

For additional information, please visit

Please RSVP before May 3rd by emailing events.rclchkl@utoronto.ca or by calling 416-946-8978.

Description

Korea has a long and proud history of the socialist/Communist political radicalism, dating back to the colonial age (1910-45) when the dual (class and national) oppression created the conditions under which the Communists came to constitute one of the most influential ideological sectors of the national movement by the mid-1920s. Koreans were also prominent in the Communist parties and movements in China, Japan and the Soviet Far East (until their forced deportation from there in 1937). Under the anti-Communist dictatorships of the 1950-70s, South Korean Left mostly struggled in the underground to survive; however, it underwent a spectacular revival in the 1980s in the wake of South Korea’s high-speed industrialization, spearheading the struggle for both national liberation (vis-à-vis US hegemony over South Korea) and social justice. Today, however, the left-nationalist passions of the 1980s are largely seen as a thing of the past, while South Korea’s working class is on defensive, struggling against fragmentation under the conditions of the neo-liberal regime. What will be the way forward for the South Korean Left in an increasingly multi-ethnic, globalized neo-liberal society? The past, present and the possible futures of the South Korean Left are to be dealt with in this presentation.

Bio: Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja) is professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University. His research focuses on the history of modern ideas in Korea. He is the author of Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: the Beginnings (Brill, 2010) as well as Modern Korea and its Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (Routledge, 2015). He also recently co-edited Buddhist Modernities – Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World (Routledge, 2017) and Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2017).

This event is presented as part of the Transformative Politics in the Transnational Korea series at the York Centre for Asian Research with support from the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

Description

The Harappan or the Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished in South Asia during the 3rd millennium BCE., is not only about large cities, vast expansion and the production and international trade of shiny Harappan-style crafts. The culture-historical thinking that has long influenced the researchers involved with the Indus Civilization has often failed to acknowledge the existence of varied regional economies, and symbiotic relationships between the rural and urban population that helped the Indus civilization to sustain and maintain its glory. The glorious aspect of the Indus Civilization is known to almost everyone interested in ancient civilizations, but how the local regional populations and micro-cultures within the broad umbrella of the Indus Civilizations have sustained themselves and maintained a harmonic interaction with the so-called elite urban population is an aspect of the Indus Civilization which is still poorly known. A number of recent studies influenced by ‘bottom-up’ models have started to focus on the rural settlements in order to understand the changes in the environment and the sustainability of the Indus Civilization, but, only a very few have looked into the economy and adaptation to the regional environment of these rural settlements. My study is one of these very few attempts that attempt to understand the rural economy, regional interaction, and environmental adaptation of a peripheral region of the Indus Civilization.

In order to decipher the rural lifestyle during the Indus Age, this study had to depend on a number of proxy methods, the application of these methods to the Indus is still in its infancy. For example, through studying the stable isotopes from the tooth enamel of domesticated animals from the rural settlement of Kotada Bhadli, we have tried to understand how the residents of this settlement treated their animals, and to what extent this was dependent on the regional climate and availability of fodder. Through looking into the lipid residues of the foods that were cooked, stored and served in ceramic vessels, we have tried to evaluate how the residents of this settlement have exploited their domesticated animals and other resources available in the vicinity of the settlement. Kotada Bhadli completely lacked any indication of trade-oriented craft activities, but a huge deposition of fine ash at this settlement tells a different story of human activities involving fire. To understand the kind of human activities that may have produced such a huge amount of ash, we studied the phytoliths from the ash to determine the nature of the things that were burnt. The information these proxies reveal to us is interesting and quite different from what we already know in general about the Indus Civilization.

Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty is an upper year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. He completed his Master’s in Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Deccan College Post-graduate and Research Institute, Pune, India. He specializes in the Indus Valley Civilization, and the focus of his PhD research is the understanding of lifeways in one of the peripheries of the Indus Civilization, including the employment of isotopic and residue analyses, and other archaeological science methods. He has participated in a number of excavations in India and in Europe, where he incorporated photogrammetry and 3D imaging with other established excavation methods. He has presented his research in conferences held in India, the U.S. and Canada, and has published two papers in peer reviewed archaeological journals, and two chapters in edited volumes.

Description

In the weeks leading up to the historic meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, China is feeling sidelined. What does Beijing want from Pyongyang? How does China’s interest in North Korea differ from that of the United States? And what might Beijing do to ensure North Korea remains within China’s sphere of influence?

Isaac Stone Fish is a journalist and a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York City; an on-air contributor to CBSN, and an international affairs analyst for PRI’s The World. Previously he served as Foreign Policy Magazine’s Asia Editor: he managed coverage of the region, and wrote about the politics, economics, and international affairs of China, Japan, and North Korea. A fluent Mandarin speaker and formerly a Beijing correspondent for Newsweek, Stone Fish spent seven years living in China prior to joining Foreign Policy. He has traveled widely in the region and in the country, visiting every Chinese province, autonomous region, and municipality.

His views on international affairs have been widely quoted, including in MSNBC, ABC, NPR, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian, the BBC, the Sydney Morning Herald, Talking Points Memo, and Al-Jazeera, among others; and in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese media. Besides publishing in Foreign Policy, Stone Fish’s articles have also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, Politico Magazine, The Daily Beast, Time, and the Los Angeles Times. While in Beijing, he served on the board of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China, and, when the sky wasn’t the color of glue, was an avid runner.

Stone Fish is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied Chinese literature. He is also a Truman National Security Project fellow, a non-resident senior fellow at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute, and an alumnus of the World Economic Forum Global Shaper’s program.

Description

Bob Rae, Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to Myanmar, discussed his report on the humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh and Myanmar. Rae engaged in extensive research, travel and meetings with key interlocutors from October 2017 to March 2018 to assess the violent events of August 2017 and afterward that led more than 671,000 Rohingya to flee their homes in Rakhine State, Myanmar, and seek refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. His report focused on four themes: the need to combine principle and pragmatism in responding to the serious humanitarian crisis in both Myanmar and Bangladesh; the ongoing political challenges in Myanmar; the strong signals that crimes against humanity were committed in the forcible and violent displacement of more than 671,000 Rohingya from Rakhine State in Myanmar; and the clear need for more effective coordination of both domestic and international efforts.*  

Jacques Bertrand, Director of the Collaborative Master’s Specialization in CESEAS, will chair and discuss the report.  He is leading a new collaborative project on ethnic minorities and decentralisation in Myanmar, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).  This project follows a previous, four-year research initiative on federalism, democratization and ethnic minorities in Myanmar, funded by the United States Institute of Peace.  

*Text adapted from: http://international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/rep_sem-rap_esm.aspx?lang=eng#a3

Description

FREE ADMISSION:
Asian Heritage Month–Canadian Foundation for Asian Culture (Central Ontario) Inc., Social Services Network in partnership with Reelworld Film Festival present:

ASIAN HERITAGE MONTH FILM FESTIVAL
CANADA 150 | Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities in Canada

Asian Heritage Month-Canadian Foundation for Asian Culture (Central Ontario) Inc.
In partnership with Reelworld Film Festival (www.reelworld.ca)
Programmed by Tonya Williams, Executive and Creative Director, Reelworld Film Festival

SHORT FILM FUSION
Canada 150|Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities in Canada
Short Films made by Students from Toronto Catholic District School Board and Toronto District School Board in Celebration of Canada 150

INTRODUCTION BY REELWORLD CHAIR OF THE BOARD MOE JIWAN

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE
Audience Q&A moderated by Reelworld Chair Moe Jiwan with filmmakers Simu Liu, Lulu Wei, Supinder Wraich and Farid Yazdani

1. Meeting Mommy| Director Tricia Lee
Zoe can only see her Mom once a year on her birthday. On the day that she turns six, Zoe has some hard questions for her father to answer.
Director: Tricia Lee- Director of award-winning films SILENT RETREAT (Best Canadian Feature -Toronto After Dark) and CLEAN BREAK (Best Drama Feature – Atlanta Horror Film Festival), Tricia has just completed her third feature BLOOD HUNTERS. Http://www.reelworld.ca/meeting-mommy

2. Silver | Director Simu Liu

During the vampire outbreak, millions either lost their lives or were turned. The world erupted into chaos. Then, a ray of hope – scientists were able to synthesize a blood substitute without the addictive and maddening qualities of human blood. The synthetic blood was mass-produced and distributed amongst the vampire population. Thus, vampires and humans came to co-exist together.

3. A Bicycle Lesson | Director: Renuka Jeyapalan |Starring: Supinder Wraich

A dramatic short film focusing on the relationship between a 2nd generation daughter and her mother. When a young woman teaches her mother how to ride a bicycle she discovers a secret that has the potential to mend their fractured relationship.
Renuka Jeyapalan is a Toronto-based filmmaker and a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Director’s Lab. Her short film Big Girl premiered at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and has screened at over thirty-five film festivals around the world. In 2010, Renuka was awarded the Kodak New Vision Mentorship Award by Women in Film and Television-Toronto and was mentored by director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen). Renuka recently wrote and directed the short film Arranged for TMN, Movie Central, and the Harold Greenberg Fund and is currently developing her first feature film, How to go to a Wedding Alone with Gearshift Films.
Supinder Wraich is an actress and filmmaker born in Chandigarh, India and raised in Toronto, Canada. She is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Actor’s conservatory, holds a BA in Communications from Ottawa University and is also a Sheridan College, Advanced Film & Television program alumni. Wraich plays the lead in the CTV Emmy Award winning series “Guidestones,” for which she earned a Canadian Screen Award. She has also appeared in numerous film and television productions including: Hunter’s Moon, Textuality, CBC’s “The Border,” CTV’s “Degrassi: The Next Generation” and “Saving Hope,” CBC’s “Combat Hospital,” Global’s “Rookie Blue,” BBC’s “Copper,” Syfy’s “Haven,” CW’s “Backpackers,” Comedy’s “The Beaverton,” Syfy’s “Incorporated,” and FX’s “The Strain.”

4. P6HUT | Web format, Supinder Wraich (director, writer), Matt Power (producer), Ontario, partner: Reelworld Film Festival
One of projects selected under the Telefilm Canada and the Talent Fund Talent Fund-supported Micro-Budget Production Program.
It’s the Hipster ‘Legally Blonde’ meets the Sopranos... P6HUT is a good girl gone bad story with a South Asian Female Anti-Hero at its center. Ashamed of her cultural heritage SURPREET DEOL aka ‘SURI’, a 27-year-old Indo-Canadian/ Instagram ‘It girl’, who has successfully separated herself from her roots is forced to return to Brampton/‘BrownTown’ after her father mysteriously disappears.
Uncovering his involvement as the head of a cross-border drug cartel Suri is forced to replace her father as the interim leader. In doing so, she begins embracing the culture she thought she escaped and her inner bad girl.

5. There’s no place like this place, Anyplace | Filmmaker selected to participate in the Doc Accelerator Emerging Filmmaker lab. 2018 Doc Accelerator Fellows Supported by Netflix.
Director: Lulu Wei | Toronto, Ontario (https://www.hotdocs.ca/i/accelerator)
A filmmaker sets out to document the redevelopment of the historic Honest Ed’s block she calls home, as a way to pay homage to its cultural heritage, and to understand the problems of development and gentrification in Toronto—problems that end up hitting closer to home than expected.
This is a feature documentary about the redevelopment of the historic Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village block. In
Toronto at the intersection of two main streets, Bloor and Bathurst, sits the iconic Toronto landmark Honest Ed’s. In 2013, Honest Ed’s and the surrounding buildings that comprise Mirvish Village were sold to be redeveloped into luxury rental towers.

6. Day Players| Up for Best Short at Canadian Comedy Awards, a Day Players is a short film created and produced by Farid Yazdani
Day Players is about six amateur actors taking the world’s most bizarre acting class together. Think Community meets Inside the Actor’s Studio. Day Players takes place in the modern day, real world. However, it’s showcased through an over produced hyper-reality. Juxtaposing the melodrama is a postmodern sensibility, which is supported by cutaway gags, flashbacks, and pop culture references.
Audience Q&A moderated by Reelworld Chair Moe Jiwan with filmmakers Simu Liu, Lulu Wei, Supinder Wraich and Farid Yazdani

FEATURE FILM: FINDING SAMUEL LOWE: FROM HARLEM TO CHINA
Introduction:

Moe Jiwan will introduce Keith Lowe who will introduce the Feature Film Finding Samuel Lowe
Moderated conversation
Q&A with Keith Lowe and Jeanette Kong moderated by Reelworld Chair of the Board Moe Jiwan

Feature Length Film: Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China
Director: Jeanette Kong
An Afro-Chinese-Jamaican Harlem family seeks their Chinese grandfather who was forever separated from their mother – his 3-year-old half-Chinese, half-Jamaican daughter – in 1920. Samuel Lowe returned to China in 1933 with a Chinese wife and 6 children. After a 91-year separation, his Black Chinese grandchildren journey to China where they find Samuel Lowe’s 300 Chinese descendants and the entire clan in reunited. The film takes viewers to Harlem, Toronto, Martha’s Vineyard, three cities in Jamaica and two cities in China to see these families of different races become One.

Jeanette Kong is a documentary filmmaker from Jamaica based in Toronto, Canada. She has more than 17 years of media experience in Canadian television formerly at TVO and as an independent producer and director.She specializes in short-form videos and documentaries including Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China, The Chiney Shop and Half: The Story of a Chinese-Jamaican Son.

Kong directed and produced Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China in 2012 for Jamaican-American media entrepreneur Paula Williams Madison. The feature-length documentary traces Madison’s search for her Chinese grandfather. It was shortlisted for Best Diaspora Documentary at the Africa Movie Academy Awards 2014 and has screened at the Reelworld Film Festival, Pan African Film Festival, the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, the UrbanWorld Film Festival, the San Diego Black Film Festival, the Honolulu African-American Film Festival, and the Garifuna Film Festival, among others. In 2015, the ReelWorld Film Festival selected Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China as its Opening Night Gala film. The film won both the ReelWorld Film Festival 2015’s ReelChoice Audience Award and ReelWorld Film Festival 2015’s Markham ReelChoice Audience Award.

In 2011, Kong taught Journalism in the Media Foundation Program at Humber College. She has a Master of Arts in Media Production from Ryerson University and a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton University.

Closing remarks – Reelworld

Organizers: Asian Heritage Month–Canadian Foundation for Asian Culture (Central Ontario) Inc., Social Services Network in partnership with Reelworld Film Festival Co-Organizers: Asian Heritage Month—Canadian Foundation for Asian Culture (Central Ontario) Inc.; Reelworld Film Festival; Richard Charles Lee Canada Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto; Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairrs, University of Toronto; Social Services Network

Asian Heritage Month Festival is partially funded by the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Description

This conference explores the role of creativity across literary and visual media in Tamil worlds. Our current situation is one that is profoundly shaped by dynamics of translation across worlds and languages, as Prof. Kanaganayakam argued through his work and life. In this context, how might we open the larger history of Tamil aesthetics from a perspective that values multiplicity as foundational to creativity itself? How are hybrid pasts recruited to speak to questions of endurance and resistance in the present? Spanning over a millennium of artistic production and aesthetic reflections, from ancient India to contemporary Sri Lanka, the research presented here will address these questions and focus on modalities of creative practice that engage with multiplicities, internal and external, as the grounds upon which new worlds in Tamil are made.

Coffee, Pastries, and Welcome: 9:00-9:45 am
Welcome Remarks 9:45-10:00 am

Session 1: Multilingualism in Tamil Literary Worlds, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Anne Monius (Harvard University)
Multilingualism in the Tamil Grammatical Tradition

Giovanni Ciotti (Universität Hamburg)
On the Use of the Linguistic Label ‘Maṇipravālam’ in Some Palm-leaf Manuscripts from Tamil Nadu

Manasicha Akepiyapornchai (Cornell University)
Vedāntadeśika’s Multilingualism: Tamil and Sanskrit Verses in the Maṇipravāḷam Rahasyatrayasāram

Suganya Anandakichenin (École Française d’Êxtreme Orient, Pondicherry)
Juggling with Two Languages: The Techniques of Explanation and Interpretation in Aḻakiya Maṇavāḷa Cīyar’s Paṉṉīrāyirappaṭi Commentary on the Tiruvāymoḻi.

12:00-1:00 pm Lunch

Session 2: Multilingualism in Tamil Literary Worlds, 1:00-2:30 pm

Krissy Roghan (University of Toronto)
Charting Courses of Tamiḻ Pulamai in Colonial South India

Christoph Emmrich (University of Toronto)
Tamil Jainism and the Multilingual Jain

Srilata Raman (University of Toronto)
Discussant

2:30 -3:00 break

Session 3: Art as World Making, 3:00-4:30 pm

S. Jeyasankar (Vipulananda Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Batticaloa)
Scarecrows: Activist Art of the People and By the People

Vasuki Jeyasankar (Artist, Batticaloa)
Art for Social Change: Experiences of a Feminist Artist

Nedra Rodrigo (York University)
Panel Chair and Discussion Facilitator

4:30-5:00 tea break and remarks

Session 4: Embodiment, Territoriality, Translation and Culture, 5:00-6:30 pm

P. Ahilan (University of Jaffna)
Embodiment: Territories and territorialities of the poetry of 1980’s Jaffna

Geetha Sukumaran (York University)
Saramakavikal: Ahilan’s poetry and its Translation

Nergis Canefe (York University)
Panel Chair and Discussion Facilitator

Conference Organizers: Darshan Ambalavanar, Francis Cody, Christoph Emmrich, Srilata Raman
With Special Support from: Kirubhalini Giruparajah, Neerajah Vignarajah, Bhavani Raman, Kuruparan Selvarajah

Description

How can think tanks contribute to policy-making and intellectual exchange in an authoritarian state? Join author, Dr. Cheng Li, for a timely and compelling discussion on the growing role of think tanks in Xi Jinping’s China.

Dr. Cheng Li is director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policyprogram at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Li focuses on the transformation of political leaders, generational change and technological development in China.
Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985 he came to the United States, where he received a master’s in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. From 1993 to 1995, he worked in China as a fellow sponsored by the Institute of Current World Affairs in the U.S., observing grassroots changes in his native country. Based on this experience, he published a nationally acclaimed book, “Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform” (1997).
Li is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including “China’s Leaders: The New Generation” (2001), “Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: The Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange 1978-2003” (2005), “China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy” (2008), “China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation” (2010), “The Road to Zhongnanhai: High-Level Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress” (in Chinese, 2012), “The Political Mapping of China’s Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign” (2012), “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”. He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title “Middle Class Shanghai: Pioneering China’s Global Integration.” He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press.

“The Power of Ideas” will be available for sale and author will be available for signing.

Description

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

9:30-10:00am – Coffee

10:00-10:10am – Opening Remarks: Yoonkyung Lee (University of Toronto)

10:10-11:30am – Keynote Speaker: Hagen Koo (University of Hawaii), Rethinking Working Class Formation in South Korea, followed by Q & A

11:30am-12:45pm – Lunch Reception

12:45-2:30pm – Panel Presentations

Chair: Yoonkyung Lee (University of Toronto)

Panel Speakers:
Jennifer Chun (University of Toronto), Religion, Ritual and Spaces of Worker Protest in South Korea
Veda Hyunjin Kim (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Hagen Koo’s Korean Workers and Marxism in the Third World
Namhee Lee (UCLA), The Democratic Transition, Working-Class Identities, and the Current State of Research
Hwa-Jen Liu (National Taiwan University), Comparisons as Conversations
Gay Seidman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Honouring Hagen Koo: Looking Back, Looking Forward

KEYNOTE: HAGEN KOO
Rethinking Working Class Formation in South Korea
South Korea has experienced one of the world’s most interesting and dynamic working-class movements during the past half century. Hagen Koo, author of the award-winning book, Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation (Cornell University Press, 2001), discusses the distinctive aspects of this movement and examines their broad theoretical implications, from a retrospective perspective.

Hagen Koo is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Born in Korea, he received his BA in Korea and worked as a journalist before coming to America. He started his graduate program at the University of British Columbia but completed his Ph.D. degree at Northwestern University. He published extensively on the political economy of development in East Asia and social transformation in South Korea during the period of rapid industrialization. His major work includes State and Society in Contemporary Korea (1993), and Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation (2001), which received a book award from the American Sociological Association and has been translated into several languages. He continues to work on the issues of inequality and changing class relations and is now completing a book on the demise of the middle class in South Korea in the neoliberal era. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at Free University of Berlin.

PANELIST PRESENTATIONS:
JENNIFER CHUN
Religion, Ritual and Spaces of Worker Protest in South Korea
This talk revisits Hagen Koo’s classic insights about the role of religious actors in supporting grassroots labour struggles in South Korea. In particular, I discuss the ongoing visibility of religious actors and religiously-inflected spectacles in the landscapes of worker protest, particularly for laid-off workers and workers in precarious jobs. Why do religious leaders continue to play such visible solidarity roles in the struggles of striking workers? How do ritualized protest acts, such as “prayer protests” and Buddhist prostration rituals, shape the aesthetic and ideological spaces of public protest?

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department and the International Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She has published widely on the changing world of work and politics, focusing on the intersections of gender, race, class and migration. She is the author of the award-winning book Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009) and has recently co-edited a double special issue in Critical Sociology (2018) entitled, “Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Migration and Care.” She is currently writing a book monograph on space and public cultures of protest in South Korea.

VEDA HYUNJIN KIM
Hagen Koo’s Korean Workers and Marxism in the Third World
I base my talk on a critical theory of imperialist capitalism and Hagen Koo’s (2001) book, Korean Workers. I argue that we can re-read our dear book of Koo, Korean Workers to re-calibrate our intellectual endeavour to pursue the programme of Third World Marxism in studies on Northeast and Southeast Asia. The South Korean political economy has been subjugated by the West—as the Asian Financial Crisis and subsequent neoliberal policy imposition starkly demonstrate—and the South Korean state’s foreign affairs are reliant on US-empire. In consequence, the South Korean social sector became Manichaean in a hegemonic/ambivalent manner (as opposed to the violent/absolute one in Fanon’s theory) and hence people’s lifestyles were creolised. I present two precariatisation experiences. Specifically, I examine SsangYong Motors’ laid-off workers and Daechuri displaced farmers, which starkly display 1) forced social changes resulting from the exertion of imperial power, 2) social isolation of the grievance groups, and 3) united resistance against power by partaking in counterpublic formation. The narrative structures in my presentation of two precariats’ resistances and class formation processes in Korean Workers are commensurate. Korean Workers is a keystone of Third World Marxism, if we take the following principles: Marxist perspective (in whatever variant), global perspective, and the close scrutiny of people’s responses.

Veda Hyunjin Kim bodily learnt about the dialectics between the imperialism and colonised lives, while he resided in UK as a poor coloured folk. He earned an MA degree from the University of Chicago and now studies for a doctoral degree in University of Massachusetts Amherst. His current concentration is on democratisation dynamics in the context of post-WWII neo-imperialism and Marxist democratization theories.

NAMHEE LEE
The Democratic Transition, Working-Class Identities, and the Current State of Research
Abstract: One of the key arguments in Hagen Koo’s pathbreaking Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation is that Korean working-class formation has been closely associated with broader socio-political processes, particularly with the democratic movement of the 1970s and the 1980s. Given the deeply transformed sociopolitical reality of South Korea since the late 1980s—the democratic transition, the collapse of the “actually existing socialism,” the global neoliberalism and the institutionalization of market and labour flexibility, and the influx of migrant workers from the 1990s, among others—what is at stake in the formation of working-class identities? What is the current state of research; in particular, how has the “cultural turn” in the field engaged with, expanded, or limited our understanding of the shifting grounds of and re-formatting working-class identities in South Korea?

Namhee Lee is associate professor of modern Korean history at UCLA and her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007). She is currently working on a book about social memory of the 1980s in the context of the persistence of the cold war in Korea as well as the global context of neoliberalism.

HWA-JEN LIU
Comparisons as Conversations
Abstract: Based on Koo’s “condensed industrialization” thesis and its negative consequence imposed on organized labour, I was inspired to further explore different types of damages that condensed industrialization has had on labour and environment and the subsequent solidification of social powers countering and moderating such damages. Through the double comparisons of Korea and Taiwan, of labour and environmental movements, I conclude that, though these two movements may seem diagonally opposite, each has certain strengths that complement the other and hence the making of a labour-environment alliance is a worthy endeavor in the new millennium.

Current project: I’m currently working on a “polluters” project. This project compiles a list of polluting corporations from historical records, and surveys their unions’ various responses and actions in environmental disputes. I will select specific pollution cases and interview workers involved in an attempt to understand how the act of pollution itself changed workers’ standing in their communities.

Hwa-Jen Liu teaches sociology at National Taiwan University. She specializes in social movements, late industrialization, and comparative methods and is the author of Leverage of the Weak: Labor and Environmental Movements in Taiwan and South Korea (the University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

GAY SEIDMAN
Honouring Hagen Koo: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Like many researchers who focus on labour movements in the global South, I have long turned to Professor Koo’s work for insight into the dynamics of South Korea’s labour movement. My remarks will highlight some of the lessons I have taken from his work, and some of the questions his work raises for broader discussions of labour dynamics in the twenty-first century going forward.

Gay Seidman is the Martindale Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Focusing mainly on labour and social movements in the global South, her books include Manufacturing Militance (Univ. of California Press, 1994) and Beyond the Boycott (Russell Sage 2007). Her current work explores refugee experiences in Cape Town’s divided labour market.

Description

Since the 1970s, there has been an enormous expansion of temporary labor migration within Asia. Some foreign workers are highly skilled, highly mobile expatriates looking to expand their professional horizons. Millions of others, however, are employed on limited-term contracts in a diverse range of blue-collar occupations, in the service sector, or as para-professionals in industries like healthcare. This army of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled temporary labor migrants—who are overwhelmingly South or Southeast Asian—plays a vital role in the economic systems of the wealthier countries in the region. They work in factories, on construction sites and plantations, and staff restaurants and hospitals. They also keep house and care for the aged and the very young.

The marginality of many foreign workers in the wealthier labor markets of the region is in large part defined by the uncertainty of their migration status. But migration status is not the only determinant of marginality: temporary labor migrants’ capacity to access the protections available to citizens may also be limited by their labor market position, which in turn determines their access to the host country’s industrial relations system, and by the presence or absence of strong local voices on their behalf.

This paper analyzes the role of civil society in challenging the labor migration regimes of seven Asian destination countries. In doing so, it distinguishes between non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which have long been the leading force in activism on behalf of temporary labor migrants, and labor unions, which have traditionally rejected the presence of foreign workers but which have faced increasing pressure to support them. The paper argues that the particular history of labor migration flows in each of these countries and the particular ways in which the migration and employment relations axes within each of these destination countries influences the forms migrant labor activism takes and its likelihood of success.

Bionote
Professor Michele Ford is Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. She also holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Michele’s research, which focuses Southeast Asian labour movements, labour migration and trade union aid, has been supported by several Australian Research Council grants. Michele is the author of From Migrant to Worker: The Global Unions and Labor Migration in Asia (Cornell ILR Press, in press) and Workers and Intellectuals: NGOs, Trade Unions and the Indonesian Labour Movement (NUS/Hawaii/KITLV 2009). She is also editor of Social Activism in Southeast Asia (Routledge 2013) and the co-editor of several volumes including Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics (Cornell SEAP 2014).

Description

We are honored to welcome Chinese Ambassador to Canada Lu Shaye, and the Charge d’Affaires of the Russian Embassy Mr. Vladimir Proskuryakov to this panel event, along with Professor Andrew Cooper, Associate Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research.

In light of the recent international G7 and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summits, which brought to surface a period of global uncertainty, this event will focus on the topic of China-Russia cooperation in global governance leading into the 10th annual BRICS Summit taking place in Johannesburg on July 25th-27th, 2018. Several important questions will be addressed at the event, in relation to recent world events whose full impacts have yet to be realized. What is the role of the BRICS in this age of increasing uncertainty? How will China and Russia approach the BRICS 2018 Johannesburg Summit? How will these countries address their shared security agenda over the denuclearization of North Korea? How can the BRICS build upon the agenda and accomplishments of the SCO Qingdao Summit?