Description

In the fall of 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping proposed a global effort known as “One-Belt-One-Road” (OBOR). Unlike many other Chinese proposals currently on the table such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which has multi-national economic development as underpinning, the implication and potential impact of OBOR appears to be deeper and broader. Roughly speaking, the upstream of OBOR is what President Xi refers to as CULTURAL COMMUNICATION (文化相通). It is an initiative to culturally (and economically as a spin-off) revitalize the Ancient Silk Routes (ASR), be they land-based or maritime-based. However, unlike ASR, OBOR’s success places unprecedented demand on China to profoundly understand other cultures and civilizations. For the maritime OBOR, India, being next door to China, geographically situated in South Asia, and with 1.2 billion people, is an unavoidable challenge. If OBOR is successful, measured not by years but decades and maybe centuries, it could initiate a neo-Renaissance to allow humanity to meet unprecedented challenges.

Da Hsuan Feng received his physics BA from Drew University (1968) and his PhD the University of Minnesota (1972). He joined Drexel University in 1976, where in 1990 he became M. Russell Wehr Chair Professor. In 1996, Feng became a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has been named an honorary professor at fifteen Chinese universities. He was a consultant for three National Laboratories in the United States: Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven, and has served on a number of academic advisory boards and university Boards of Trustees throughout Asia. In 2000, Feng became Vice President for Research and Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 2007 to 2014, he brought significant change to Taiwan as Senior Executive Vice President of National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) and National Tsing Hua University (NTHU). Since 2007, Feng has lectured widely throughout Asia on challenges of higher education. In 2014, he assumed his current position at the University of Macau. In the past year has lectured extensively on One-Belt-One-Road in Singapore, Malaysia, Mainland China, and Taiwan.

Diana Fu is an assistant professor of Asian Politics.  Her research examines the relationship between popular contention, state power, and civil society, with an emphasis on contemporary China.  Her book manuscript, “Mobilizing Without the Masses in China” examines state control and civil society contention under authoritarian rule.  Based on two years of ethnographic research that tracks the development of informal labor organizations, the book explores counterintuitive dynamics of organized contention in post-1989 China. Articles that are part of this broader project have appeared in Governance (Forthcoming), Comparative Political Studies (2016) and Modern China (2009) among others.  Her research has been supported by the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation, and the Rhodes Trust, Prior to joining the department, she was a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Political Science.   She holds a D.Phil. In Politics and an M.Phil. In Development Studies with distinction from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. 

Yong Wang is Professor at School of International Studies, and the Director of the Center for International Political Economy, Peking University. He is also Professor at Party School of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, and Former Visiting Chevalier Chair Professor at Institute of Asian Research(IAR), University of British Columbia(UBC). Member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Agenda Council on Global Trade and FDI, Asia Society Regional Trade Architecture Commission and Economic Diplomacy Expert Working Group of China Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). He has published numerous books and articles focusing on the topics of Chinese political economy, foreign policy, China-US relations, regional cooperation, international political economy, World Trade Organization (WTO) and global governance. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Global Asia, the Journal of Global Governance, the journal of Contemporary Politics and the Journal of Human Security. His recent article on political economy of One Belt One Road is published by UK-based journal of Pacific Review.

Description

For the last decade, a large contingent of manufacturing firms in developmental zones on China’s coast has moved to inland provinces. What are the implications of this move inland for Chinese workers? Research on labor conditions in the current period of economic globalization and mobile capital debates the existence of a “race to the bottom” in labor standards through the pressures of international capital mobility. These theories predict that as inland China develops and attracts a larger amount of foreign and domestic capital, inland governments will compete by offering cheap labor and lower or unenforced standards.

Our argument in this paper is contrarian in that we propose the possibility of a positive relationship between the movement inland and labor conditions. We argue that the movement of manufacturing to inland China is not primarily about cheaper workers, but instead signals the beginning of a fundamental shift in the development model through the employment of a localized workforce.

Using audit data from Apple Corporation suppliers (2007-2013), supplementary survey data, and in-depth interviews, we conduct a structured case study of two cities that have attracted significant investment from Apple suppliers—Chengdu and Shenzhen—to draw some of the main hypotheses and to discuss possible causal mechanisms for this relationship between localized production and better labor conditions. We also provide initial empirical evidence that firm relocation toward inland does not necessarily lead to degradation of labor conditions.

Mary Gallagher is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan where she is also the director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. Professor Gallagher received her Ph.D in politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991. She was a foreign student in China in 1989 at Nanjing University. She also taught at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-1997. She was a Fulbright Research Scholar from 2003 to 2004 at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai, China. In 2012-2013, she was a visiting professor at the Koguan School of Law at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Her forthcoming book, Authoritarian Legality: Law, Workers, and the State in China, will be published by Cambridge University Press this year. She is also the author or editor of several other books, including Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton 2005), Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (Cambridge 2011), From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China (Cornell 2011), and Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (Cambridge 2010).

Description

This presentation explores “folded time” in which the present disappears through the imperative of cure in South Korea. By folding time, cure demands temporal crossings to a past through “rehabilitation” and “recovery” and to a future without disabilities and illnesses. By thinking about the imperative of cure as a time machine, Kim explores the possibility of inhabiting in the present with disability and illness. Cure appears as an attempt at category-crossing from otherness to normality, which reveals the multiplicity of the boundaries that divide “human” and “inhuman” as well as “life” and “nonlife.” Kim also discusses the temporal trap into which discussions of non-Western societies in Western academic contexts might fall, one that denies coevalness or universalizes disability experiences across different cultural and historical contexts. In this analysis, cure is reframed, not as unequivocally beneficial nor politically harmful, but as a set of political, moral, economic, emotional, and ambivalent negotiations.

Eunjung Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching involve transnational feminist disability studies, visual cultures, Korean cultural history of disability and activism, humanitarian communications, asexuality theories, and queer inhumanism.

Description

Infrastructure in general, and road in particular, has become one of the priority sectors in Nepal’s development efforts and it has become a major concern for many Nepali people. Road building projects have always been a major focus of government and donor programming, from the beginning of planned development initiatives in the 1950s. Road projects were highly centralized and the central state and donors were major dominating agencies during the 1960s and 70s. Now, multiple actors have engaged and road building can broadly be explained as tripartite coordination among the state (both central and local), donors, and local communities. The state, donors, and community practices through which roads have been constructed in Nepal vary across time and place. Considering those practices and the wider scale of political interests, roads have become a key site of governance contestation.

In this paper, I sketch out the emergence of governmental landscapes (policy, institutions and actors) from the readings of archives; policies, plans, and other historical documents produced by the government of Nepal, World Bank, and other organizations or individuals, and information collected from multiple research sites. Considering the dynamics of political history, I analyze the political economies and political rationalities of road building in Nepal and relate this history to some international scholarship on infrastructure.

Tulasi Sharan Sigdel is a PhD scholar at the School of Arts, Kathmandu University, and Research Fellow in Infrastructure of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practices in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts. He examines what kind of democratic practices and governance regimes have emerged from the grassroots in post-conflict politics in Nepal.

Mr. Sigdel graduated in Rural Development studies from Tribhuvan University, and examined local planning processes in rural Nepal for his graduate thesis. After his graduation, he served at the Rural Development Department, TU, for five years in the capacity of Assistant Lecturer. Then he joined Nepal Administrative Staff College, a national level training institution which trains government officers and carries out policy research. As a senior faculty (Director of Studies) in the college, he trains bureaucrats in the areas of governance, development planning, democracy, and state-building and he has engaged in different research projects. He brings a mix of experiences working closely with Nepali bureaucrats and researching democracy and governance practices from the grassroots.

Description

This paper examines the key narratives in the development of Malaysian modern art in the last 100 years. It will start with a discussion on Low Kway Song’s “Portrait of Man in Three Piece Suit with Orchid on Lapel” produced in 1917 and the art scene in Malaya prior to its Independence. Post Independence saw an exposure of Western Abstract Expressionism, albeit in a localized manner, on Malaysian art pioneered by newly returned Malaysian artists from their studies abroad. Such influence could be observed in the works of Syed Ahmad Jamal and Latiff Mohidin. However, the period of late 1970s and throughout 1980s has changed the previous trend, which marked a new turning point in Malaysian art, due to the implementation of the National Cultural Policy and Islamization Policy. Tis was followed by the decade of the 1990s that witnessed a growing Malaysian art scene that led to the produce of artworks that were indirectly conditioned by the ‘postmodern situation’. This paper will conclude with the works of selected Malaysian artists in the current Singapore Biennale: An Atlas of Mirrors (2016).

Sarena Abdullah is a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), where she teaches Art History subjects for both undergraduate and graduate class. She has an MA in Art History from the State University of New York, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.A., and a PhD in Art History (2010) from the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia. Her research interests are contemporary Malaysian and Southeast Asian Art. She has numerous papers published both locally and abroad, and has presented at conferences in Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, the United States and China. She is one of the Field Leader for “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” a research project led by the Power Institute, The University of Sydney and funded by the Getty Foundation in 2015. She was the recipient of the 2016 CAA-Getty Travel Grant as part of the CAA-Getty International Program and will be part of the 2017 CAA-Getty International Reunion Program in February as well.

Description

Since 1990, when the Soviet Union and South Korea established diplomatic ties, over 4,000 Koreans from Sakhalin Island (Russia) have “returned” to their so-called ethnic homeland, now in South Korea. This return migration program has been supported by the Japanese and South Korean governments, named a humanitarian aid, with older Sakhalin Koreans being granted citizenship in South Korea. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on Sakhalin in South Korea (2010-2011, 2016), I present everyday experiences of citizenship among older Sakhalin Koreans in a transnational setting. This return project, offering a range of material and social assistance, has provoked new aspirations to live; at the same time it entails a new sense of unfairness, moral discourses around dependency, contested claim-making practice, and reflections of self through Others. These experiences show the ways older Sakhalin Koreans negotiate moral and political personhood as they reconfigure historically shaped relations to key nation-states including Japan, Russia, and South Korea. Situating the practices and imaginaries of citizenship of older Sakhalin Koreans within the shifting geopolitics of Northeast Asia, this study offers an analysis and understanding of subjectivities in the times of post-colonial and post-cold war transformations.

Sungsook Lim completed her Master’s degree in Anthropology at Hanyang University in Korea in 2004, and continued to study anthropology in the Ph.D. program at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research project considered return mobility among older Sakhalin Koreans, specially focusing on their kinship and citizenship practices. Sungsook completed her PhD degree in 2016, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow of the Korea Foundation.

Description

THE LEGAL HISTORY OF BURMA over the course of the second millennium CE offers a series of literary, juridical, and intellectual contributions that are unique when considered in relation to the wider Buddhist world of South, Central, and East Asia. From the 13th through 19th centuries upper Burma was a regional center for the production of a distinctive genre of Buddhist legal literature known as dhammasattha (“treatise on law”), whose laws claimed jurisdiction over all members of society, including monks and laypersons, and kings, commoners, and slaves. Prose and verse dhammasattha texts were composed in Pali and vernacular languages (Burmese, Mon, Arakanese, Shan, etc.), as well as in
bilingual gloss versions (nissaya), and there is extensive testimony, dating from the mid-13th century onward, for their utilization by judges in contexts of dispute resolution. Aspects of the early history of this genre can be gleaned from lithic epigraphy, vernacular poetry, and bibliographic catalogues (piṭakat samuiṅḥ), although surviving dhammasattha treatises, transmitted in palm-leaf and paper manuscripts, can be dated no earlier than circa 1637, whereas the youngest examples of the tradition were written under British colonialism around 1900.

For the past decade Christian Lammerts has been involved in the first major study of this genre—its textual histories, laws, and shifting modes of reception and jurisprudence—on the basis of extensive fieldwork in Burma and close investigation of the epigraphic corpus and manuscript archive, which preserves hundreds of discrete texts in multiple, sometimes highly variant, versions. In this presentation Lammerts will discuss the results of this project, drawn from his forthcoming book, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, c. 1250–1850 CE (University of Hawai’I Press).

D. CHRISTIAN LAMMERTS is Assistant Professor of Buddhist and Southeast Asian Studies at Rutgers University. He is interested in the cultural and intellectual histories of Buddhism and religious law in Burma and Southeast Asia, and is currently at work on a study of
juridical curses, oaths, and ordeals around of the Bay of Bengal from the late first
millennium CE up to the early colonial era.

Description

Director Hu Tai-Li’s film “Returning Souls” tells the story of the Taiwanese indigenous people, the Amis, recovering their land, restoring customs and reclaiming their ancient artifacts.

Following the film, Professor Scott Simon of the University of Ottawa’s School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, based on two decades of ethnographic work in Taiwan, will discuss issues of indigenous rights and cultural change among the Amis and other indigenous peoples in order to understand Hu Tai-li’s film in the wider socio-political context.

Professor Cara Krmpotich of University of Toronto’s iSchool Museum Studies program will draw on her ethnographic research with Canadian indigenous experiences of repatriation to discuss central themes of Director Hu Tai-Li’s film of indigenous Taiwanese efforts to repatriate material and ancestral remains, with a focus on the social, cultural, spiritual, museological and political issues evoked.

Bart Testa, of University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, will moderate.

PLEASE REGISTER AND ARRIVE 20 MINUTES BEFORE SCREENING TO ENSURE A SEAT

Program:

5:30 Doors open
6:00 Welcome
Remarks by Director-General Y.M. Catherine Hsu, Taipei Economic and Culture Office in Toronto
6:05 Film screening of Returning Souls directed by Hu Tai-Li
7:35 Presentations by Professor Scott Simon and Professor Cara Krmpotich
8:05 Panel discussion and Q&A Moderated by Professor Bart Testa
8:45 Post-screening Party

Bios:

Cara Krmpotich is Associate Professor, Museum Studies, at the iSchool. She researches and teaches in the areas of indigenous & museum relations; cultural property; critical collections management; and material culture and kinship. She leads a program that encourages hands-on artefact handling as a vehicle for collective memory work with urban Aboriginal seniors and has a long-term research partnership with the Haida Repatriation Committee.

Scott Simon is Professor and Co-Chair in Taiwan Studies. He specializes in the anthropology of indigeneity in Taiwan, including issues of political autonomy, legal pluralism, and hunting rights. He continues to conduct ethnographic research in Hualien and Nantou, more recently by collaborating with hunters to study human-animal relations. His most recent book was published by Presses de l’Université Laval.

Bart Testa is Associate Professor (teaching) at the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto. His teaching includes courses on Chinese Cinemas, European, Asian and European auteurs, narrative theory and cinema, urbanism and film, experimental cinema, Science Fiction movies and other popular genres.

Description

Interrogating Notions of Development and Progress (INDePth) is an annual undergraduate conference hosted by the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. Founded by Contemporary Asian Studies major students, the series has held conferences on Indonesia, China, Korea and Japan. Our aim is to foster dialogue on Asia through interdisciplinary analysis. INDePth utilizes research methodologies offered by courses from the Asian Institute to unpack the prism of ‘Asia’ through notions of ‘development’ and ‘progress’.

The theme for this year’s conference is South Asian Worlds. Dominant discourse within mainstream agencies such as the World Bank and IMF, domestic national programs and academic discourse imagine South Asia as an active site of intervention. Discourse that is embedded into the imagining and practice of institutions characterize ‘developing’ space as ‘backward’, ‘lacking’ or otherwise a systematic ‘standard’. Participants will engage with how such South Asian Worlds are simultaneously constructed through the human imagination and physically materialized through uneven processes of development practice. We aim to emphasize South Asia as a conceptual site of research that extends beyond national borders and traditional ‘area studies’.

By doing so, we look at the ways in which the concept of Worlding challenges notions of ‘third world’ development discourse and helps to understand the region.

Join us on March 10th for the 2017 Conference to debate and take part in workshops with fellow delegates, the executive members of the INDePth team, and academic speakers from leading universities in Canada and the United States.

Keynote Address:

Professor Chandrima Chakraborty, Department of English & Cultural Studies, McMaster University

Moderators:

Professor Rachel Silvey, Interim Director of the Asian Institute, Geography & Planning, University of Toronto
Dr. Antonela Arhin, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
Professor Francis Cody, Department of Anthropology

Schedule:

10:30 AM – 11:00 AM Registration and Informal Lunch

11:00 AM – 11:15 AM Conference Introduction

11:15 AM – 12:00 AM Keynote Speech

12:00 AM – 1:00 PM Panel 1: Remapping Boundaries

1:00 PM – 1:45 PM Breakout Workshops

1:45 PM – 2:10 PM Coffee Break

2:10 PM – 2:30 PM Dance Performance

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM Panel 2: Worlding Beyond Borders

4:00 PM – 4:15 PM Conclusion

4:15 PM – 6:00 PM Reception

Description

Lecture Abstract:  National governments the world over face the formidable challenge of figuring out how to sustain or enhance economic prosperity while contributing to the global effort to ensure environmental sustainability.  The Government of Japan, together with the business community and civil society, have been wrestling with this issue for several decades.  Japan has promoted the development and implementation of new products and services, urged commercial exports of environmental technologies and implemented stringent environmental protection measures.  While far from the only nation seeking to produce "Green Growth," the Government of Japan has encouraged a wide range of technological innovations, from electric and fuel cell vehicles and smart grid implementations to futuristic technologies designed to convert energy from outer space into electricity on earth.  The Green Growth strategy remains largely untested, in part because of the inherent contradictions of seeking to expand economic activity while conserving energy, reducing pollution, and constraining the  environmental impact of human beings. This presentation examined Japan’s commercial developments service innovations and explored the lessons to be learned from the Japanese approach to the promotion of Green Growth.  

Speaker Bio:  Dr. Carin Holroyd is President, Japan Studies Association of Canada and Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Saskatchewan.  She has published extensively on aspects of Japan’s international trade, commercial relations with Canada, and national innovation policies in Japan.  Her books include Government, International Trade and Laissez Faire Capitalism: Canada, Australia and New Zealand’s Relations with Japan (McGill-Queen’s) and co-authored with Ken Coates, Japan and the Internet Revolution (Palgrave-Macmillan), Innovation Nation: Japanese Science and Technology in the 21st Century (Palgrave¬ Macmillan), Digital Media in East Asia: National Innovation and the Transformation of a Region. (Cambria Press) and The Global Digital Economy (Cambria).  Her most recent book, Green Japan, Environmental Technologies and Economic Growth, will be released by the University of Toronto Press in 2017.

Description

The talk will cover the subject of kampung, its recent fate and fortune, and whether its change is desirable? And how might the current change of kampung be understood in the context of capitalist modernization, urban governance, and politics of the city. The materials for the talk will be drawn from an on-going collaborative research with a university and notes taken from recent visits to Jakarta.

Abidin Kusno is a professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. His recent publications include The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in  Indonesia (2010); After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta (2013); Visual Cultures of the Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (2016).

Description

Lecture Abstract:

The Korean War was in fact two wars: the first was fought over territory from June 1950 to June 1951; the second was over prisoners, especially the Chinese prisoners wishing to “return to Taiwan,” from late 1951 to July 1953. While the first war restored territorial status quo ante, the second war’s only visible outcome was the “defection” of 14,220 Chinese prisoners to Taiwan and 7,574 North Korean prisoners to South Korea—at the cost of doubling the length of the war and numerous casualties on all sides. Contrary to the Communist allegation of an American conspiracy, this outcome was unplanned. Two separately conceived U.S. policies—prisoner reindoctrination and voluntary repatriation—became intertwined and resulted in the rise of anti-Communist prisoners, who soon hijacked the war agenda. The U.S. government became hostage to its own moralistic but ultimately hypocritical policy and to prisoners—a reality so embarrassing that it has remained largely unknown to the American people. Using archival documents and oral histories, this talk will examine the interplay between policies and prisoners’ actions. It will also chart the extraordinary experiences of several prisoner leaders.

Speaker Bio:

David Cheng Chang (常成) is an Assistant Professor of History at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of California, San Diego in 2011. He studies the Korean War, the Cold War, U.S.-China relations, and the history of war photography.

Description

What does Xi Jinping’s China mean for the West? How will Trump’s attitude towards Taiwan affect cross-strait relations? What are the implications of China’s recent shift from majority rural to majority urban population?

Such questions may form a starting point for this roundtable conversation, in which speakers will discuss China’s past and future in light of current global events.

Description

Abstract:  America’s 45th president, Donald J. Trump, was inaugurated in January of 2017. His unexpected victory was a surprise to many and it became the second major global shock in 2016 after Brexit. As an individual who has never held public office, he came to power by adroitly harnessing the anger of the American voter. Despite comparisons to past US presidents such as Jackson, TR, Nixon, and Reagan, in many ways he is a new type of leader that America has not witnessed since the beginning of the Republic. Although it will require many more months to be able to fully assess the new president’s policies, one can assume that his policies will be quite different than those of his predecessor.  In a world which an undercurrent toward a power transition can be witnessed, in which direction will President Trump lead the US? Moreover, as a leader devoid of any strong ideology besides “Making America Great Again,” his policies will surely be much vaguer and harder to pin down. However, he has surrounded himself with advisors and senior administration officials who do not necessarily toe the same foreign policy position toward such countries as China and Russia. Considering that he also does not have full support of a few senior GOP leaders on matters of foreign policy, how will this multilevel tug-o-war play out? And amid an era of ever increasing uncertainties, what can we expect the future course of US foreign policy be, particularly toward Asia? Will the previous Asia Pivot policy become an Asia Pullback policy similar to Nixon’s Guam doctrine of the 1970s? Furthermore, how should Japan and other nations deal with an increasingly inward America that will be much less predictable and perhaps even more reckless? Through this presentation, I presented a possible geopolitical scenario of the future that incorporates the major powers of US, Japan, China, Russia, and the EU.  

Speaker:  Tosh Minohara is Professor of Diplomacy at the Graduate School of Law and Politics, Kobe University where he holds a joint appointment with the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies. He received his B.A. in International Relations from University of California, Davis, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science and Diplomatic History from Kobe University. In the past, he has had various visiting appointments with such universities as Harvard University, University of California at Irvine, University of Iowa (Noguchi Distinguished Fellow), University of Oxford, Leiden University, Stockholm University, Kuwait University, Seoul National University, and most recently, Inha University, ROK. His main research themes are, from a historical perspective, the diplomatic, political, and security dimension of US-Japan relations. He is currently interested in applied history. He has published widely and his first monograph, The Japanese Exclusion Act and US-Japan Relations [in Japanese], was awarded the Shimizu Hiroshi Prize in 2002. He is also the editor of Tumultuous Decade: Empire, Society, and Diplomacy in 1930s Japan (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World during the 1910s (Brill, 2014). He is also the English translation editor of the forthcoming,The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has several op-ed columns and comments frequently for major new outlets throughout the world. In addition to NHK in Japan, he regularly appears as a navigator in several National Geographic programs.  

Discussants:  Aleksandra Babovic is currently a PhD student at Kobe University Graduate School of Law with a specialization in Diplomatic History. She earned her MA degree from Paris School of International Affairs. She is a Lecturer at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and Osaka University. Her research interests include Japanese post-war history, international criminal law and justice, and more specifically the Tokyo Tribunal.  Ms Babovic spoke on International Relations under Trump Administration, from perspective of Europe.  

David A. Welch is CIGI Chair of Global Security at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, where he has recently been working on Asia-Pacific Security.  Professor Welch spoke on International Relations under Trump Administration, from perspective of Canada.

Description

Chino is a history of comparative race relations that considers the function of anti-Chinese politics in shaping Mexican mestizo national identity during and after the 1910 revolution. Evidence from U.S. and Mexican archives shows how anti-Chinese politics created a nationalistic public sphere. Building on the hemispheric turn in Asian American Studies, this talk argues that Mexican anti-Chinese politics differed from U.S. racial politics because Mexican Orientalism was expressed, as mob violence, social campaigns, and government policy to aid the post-revolutionary enlistment of an indigenous citizenry. These developments became the basis of new social bonds across the country and enabled a diverse Mexican polity to claim and occupy a state-endorsed mixed-race, mestizo identity (inclusive of indigeneity). Chino critiques a monolithic notion of racism by marking out a comparative methodology for transnational racial analysis in the Americas.

Jason Oliver Chang is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and History at the University of Connecticut. He also serves as Associate Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Association. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies.

Description

This paper, which I wrote with Seung-Cheol Lee, gives attention to the coexistence between increasing concerns about the “crisis” of society and increasing “social construction” projects exercised in the name of “the social.” Under circumstances where neoliberal doctrines penetrate deep into a realm of subjectification, how can we understand the reality that “society” is central to state governance and, furthermore, reconstructed as an ethical field? With an eye to recent projects of social construction in South Korea and China, this study aims to answer the following inquiries. How can social construction projects be analyzed and contextualized in countries where the state did not go through the so-called stage of “social government” found in the Western welfare state? How does the state accomplish a double mission to disperse its functions to social realms and re-articulate managerial power when it intervenes in social construction projects? How do various participants in social construction projects in the two countries experience and react to the tensions between “society” as the assemblage of social rights, solidarities, and socialities, and “society” as the target of state governance and engineered projects?

Mun Young Cho is an associate professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research focuses on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. She is the author of the book The Specter of “The People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Description

Borrowing the name of the recent Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library exhibit, , I will consider the visual imagery of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) over a longer period than the “Ten Years of Chaos.” I will look back at some of the earlier, non-revolutionary sources, at the dissemination of those images during the Cultural Revolution, and show some of them in a more recent context. In particular, I will look at some of the most ubiquitous items of the time – for example, the red, bright and shiny Mao badges and the more restrained designs on coins and banknotes. These items were some of the smallest in everyday use, and the imagery on these items can be understood immediately – if you know the visual and political vocabulary.

Helen Wang is Curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum. She is the author of The Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (based on the British Museum collection of Mao badges). She is also the translator of Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze and Sunflower, a children’s novel set in a rural area during the Cultural Revolution.

Description

In April 2016, nine teams pitched their ideas to a panel of judges to compete for funding in the Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC, formerly Big Ideas Competition). In this presentation, the winning teams will present the results of their projects to show how they applied their academic studies to make a difference in addressing real-world issues in Asia and what they learned from the process.

Winners of this year’s Insights through Asia Challenge, who will carry out their projects in summer 2017, will also be presented with their awards.

Presenters Include:

Evaporative Cooling Vests – Preventing Deadly Heat Stress
Presentation by Adam Sheikh

Thousands of migrant construction workers in the Gulf have died as a result of heat induced heart complications. Local governments have done little to address serious workplace safety problems giving construction companies little incentive to ensure the safety of cheap, easily replaceable, labour. Through use of low cost cooling vests we have found a means of changing this dynamic and ensure protecting workers’ is less costly then leaving them exposed.

Upward
Presentation by David Tobiasz and Melody Liang

Upward is a small-scale educational development project founded by three University of Toronto graduate students that provides dynamic classroom experiences to migrant children in China.

Cleanopy Air4Kids
Presentation by Natalia Mykhaylova and Julie Huber

Our overall goal is to reduce the health risk factors of air pollution for children by providing affordable devices for monitoring and purifying the air and an awareness campaign that together will result in reduced disease incidence and improved health. We have conducted a detailed survey of parents, clinicians and NGOs and used the findings to improve the design of our solution.

Red Pocket

Our goal was to disrupt stereotypes of Chinese people as silent and conservative by elevating lived experiences and voices of youth. Through our media production company, we have aimed to encourage discussion about racial stereotyping and to share real stories from real people.

Description

Lecture Abstract:

Forget Chineseness provides a critical interpretation not only of discourses of Chinese identity—Chineseness—but also of how they have reflected differences between “Chinese” societies, such as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, PRC, Singapore and communities “overseas”. It asserts that identity has meaning not only in cultural, representational terms but is moreover a product of its embeddedness in specific entanglements of modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation, and globalization. By articulating these processes underlying institutional practices vis-à-vis public mindsets, it is thus possible to elucidate various epistemic moments that lay the basis for their socio-political transformation.
From a broader perspective, this should have salient ramifications for prevailing discussions of identity politics. Not only has the concept of identity been predicated on flawed notions of ethnicity and culture in the social “sciences”, but it has been acutely exacerbated by polarizing assumptions that drive our understanding of identity “politics”.

Speaker Bio:

Allen Chun is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His research interests include socio-cultural theory, (trans)national identity, and (post)colonial formations. Most of his work has dealt with Chinese-speaking societies, contemporary and late traditional. In addition to a monograph, Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of “Land” in the New Territories of Hong Kong (2000), he edited a special double issue of Cultural Studies (vol. 14, nos. 3–4), “(Post)Colonialism and Its Discontents”; a special issue of Social Analysis (vol. 46, no. 2), “Global Dissonances”; and co-edited a book, Refashioning Pop Music in Asia: Cosmopolitan Flows, Political Tempos and Aesthetic Industries (2004). His major articles have appeared in diverse journals, including Toung Pao, Late Imperial China, History and Anthropology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Historical Sociology, Current Anthropology, Theory Culture & Society, boundary 2, Communal/Plural, Cultural Anthropology, Postcolonial Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, and positions.

Description

From 1966 to 1968, students and workers in urban China were embroiled in deadly factional battles in what many of them believed to be a revolution of a lifetime – the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In the middle of factional violence, they also expressed radical ideas of political dissent. Based on the recently published book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), this talk argues that both violence and dissent were the results of the dramatic enactment of a revolutionary culture. The mechanism of this enactment was revolutionary competition. This conclusion has direct implications for understanding the role of political culture in collective violence in today’s world.

Guobin Yang is an Associate Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), and Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (2 vols. 2003). He is the editor of Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Victor Pickard, forthcoming), China’s Contested Internet (2015), The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (with Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, 2016), and Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (with Ching-Kwan Lee, 2007).

Description

The crisis of global modernity has been produced by human overreach that was founded upon a paradigm of national modernization. Today, three global changes: the rise of non-western powers, the crisis of environmental sustainability and the loss of authoritative sources of transcendence – the ideals, principles and ethics once found in religions — define our condition. The physical salvation of the world is becoming the transcendent goal of our times, transcending national sovereignty. The foundations of sovereignty can no longer be sought in tunnelled histories of nations; we are recognizing that histories have always been circulatory and the planet is a collective responsibility.

I re-consider the values and resources in Asian traditions—particularly of China and India– that Max Weber found wanting in their capacity to achieve modernity. Several traditions in Asia, particularly in local communities offer different ways of understanding the relationship between the personal, ecological and universal. The idea of transcendence in these communities is more dialogical than radical or dualistic: separating God or the human subject from nature. Transnational civil society, NGOS, quasi-governmental and inter-governmental agencies committed to to the inviolability or sacrality of the ‘commons’ will need to find common cause with these communities struggling to survive.

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. Born and educated in India, he received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was Professor of History and East Asian Studies at University of Chicago (1991-2008) and Raffles Professor and Director of Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2008-2015).

His books include Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) winner of Fairbank Prize of the AHA and Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA, Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014; discussion of the book can be found in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/world/asia/china-religion-prasenjit-duara.html?ref=world

Description

In mid-1975, Deng Xiaoping, with Mao’s blessing, initiated reforms that targeted the negative consequences of the Cultural Revolution. To bolster Deng’s effort, Mao endowed him with penultimate authority over the party, government and military. However, in late October, Mao turned on Deng, and within five months, Mao and the radicals toppled Deng from power.
Chinese society supported Deng’s changes. In January 1976, Beijingers used Zhou’s death to express fears that his moderate policies and persona would be swept aside by the radicals. In early-April, several million Beijingers took over Tiananmen Square and denounced the radicals and challenged Mao’s vision for China’s future.
As a foreign student at Peking University, I observed and photographed four key points in this historic struggle: (1) the initial establishment of a “big character poster” compound at Peking U; (2) emotional mourning for Zhou Enlai in Tiananmen Square following his death: (3) the intensified assault on Deng in February 1976 at Peking U; and (4) the massive demonstration of support in Tiananmen Square on April 3rd and 4th for the end of Maoist politics

David Zweig is Chair Professor, Division of Social Science, and Director, Center on China’s Transnational Relations (www.cctr.ust.hk), HKUST. He is an Adjunct Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, and Vice-President of the Center on China’s Globalization (Beijing). He lived in China for 4 years (1974-76, 1980-81, 1986 and 1991-92), and in Hong Kong since 1996. In 1984-85, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. His Ph.D. is from The University of Michigan (Political Science, 1983).

He is the author of four books, including Internationalizing China: domestic interests and global linkages (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002) and a new edited book, Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles: Resource Diplomacy under Hegemony, with Hao Yufan (Routledge: 2015). In 2013, he received The Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and in 2015 received grant from the RGC for a project entitled, “Coming Home: Reverse Migration of Entrepreneurs and Academics in India and Turkey in Light of the Chinese Experience.”

Description

In the early years of the Republic the revolutionary Cantonese brush-and-ink painter Gao Jianfu (1879-1951) presented Sun Yatsen, father of the Republic, with an essay in which he argued that porcelain manufacture would save the new nation. Important among Gao’s own porcelain designs was a dish painted with mantises devouring pupa, encircled by a rim ornamented with patterns of stylized fishes, flowers, and birds on a ground much like Japanese shibori tie-dyed textiles. The striking contrast of the decorative rim with the specimen-like insect depiction at the dish’s centre raises questions. How did the rim’s artificial lines mediate the naturalism of the insects to embody Gao’s radical conception of modern design – a design that was more than formal, but social and political as well? And what did it mean for the nation to see and touch insects on their patriotic porcelains? How, in short, was the dish designed and designing?

Lisa Claypool publishes widely on late imperial and Republican-era visual culture and design in China, and has curated and published a series of essays and interviews about contemporary art. She is currently at work on two projects: a book about the mediation of science through the ink brush in early 20th century China, and; an article about curatorial practices of contemporary artists in China.

本人在阿尔伯塔大学主要教授中国艺术方面的课程，并负责大学美术馆的中国古代绘画和艺术藏品的管理和展览. 主要研究方向包括十八世纪之后的中国艺术和现当代视觉文化。目前已有多篇关于博物馆、近现代艺术、展览学以及审美学的文章在重要学术刊物和会议出版物中发表。

Description

Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security.

Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy.

Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.
Beatrice Jauregui is assistant professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She is coeditor of the Handbook of Global Policing and Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.