Description

How can Southeast Asian cities build resilience of the most vulnerable to climate change? The Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia Partnership (UCRSEA) helps address this challenge by researching how to make urban climate governance more inclusive & equitable. We invite you to join an afternoon of presentations from four graduate students who will share their findings from recent fieldwork in the region.

Presenters:

Dual challenges of migration & climate change: Experiences of Myanmar labour migrants in Phuket, Thailand
Angelica de Jesus, PhD student, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Leaving the coast: the interplay of wellbeing and resilience for coastal fishing communities in Cambodia
Furqan Asif, PhD student, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa

Deconstructing Perceptions of Vulnerability and Risk in Khon Kaen’s Informal Spaces
Nathan Stewart, MA student, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Role of Public Partcipation in Sustainable Development: Building Light Rail Transit in Khon Kaen
Anshul Bhatnagar, MA student, Sustainability Management Program, University of Toronto

Chair: Amrita Daniere, Co‐Director, UCRSEA; Vice‐Principal, Academic and Dean at University of Toronto Mississauga

The event is presented as part of UCRSEA at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and funded by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Description

Fresh from their Guinness World Record breaking tough ride around China, adventure motorcyclists Ryan and Colin Pyle are gearing up for a completely new challenge – an epic 14,000 kilometer, 54 day circumnavigation around India. Tough Rides: India takes the biker brothers from the crowded capital city of New Delhi to the isolated northern Himalayan regions, back down to the rain forests of the southeast and up the tiger infested jungles of Bengal. Colin and Ryan Pyle will travel around a country full of contrasts, one minute India is colorful and vibrant, the next crowded and chaotic. Their biggest challenge will be taking on some of the planet’s most dangerous roads.

Ryan Pyle, born in Toronto, Canada, spent his early years close to home. After obtaining a degree in International Politics from the University of Toronto in 2001, Ryan realized a lifelong dream and travelled to China on an exploratory mission. In 2002 Ryan moved to China permanently and in 2004 he became a regular contributor to the New York Times. In 2009 Ryan was listed by PDN Magazine as one of the 30 emerging photographers in the world. In 2010 Ryan began working full time on television and documentary film production and has produced and presented several large multi-episode television series for major broadcasters in the USA, Canada, UK, Asia, China and continental Europe.

Twitter @ryanpyle

Note: The screening and discussion will take place from 4 PM – 6 PM and is followed by a reception.

Description

Speculative property bubble has become a lived experience of many urbanites in the global South and in particular, East Asia that experienced condensed urbanisation under strong states. East Asian economies have been paying a committed attention to property development, aiming to maximise rent extraction through commodification of space and yet resulting in gentrification, domicide and dispossession. Mega-projects are launched to produce brand new towns sometimes labelled as eco- or smart cities, despite the reality that these projects usually turn out to be nothing more than real estate speculation. The urbanisation experience is negatively shared by indigenous populations whose dwellings and farmlands for survival are destructed to make ways for new real estate investments. Given the substantial impact on the built environment and especially the existing residential landscape, the contemporary speculative urbanisation in East Asia or the global East, and to a large extent in other economies increasingly subject to planetary urbanisation, witnesses harmful concentration of resources in fixed assets, especially the real estate sector, creating housing poverty of affluence.

Keynote Speech by Hyun Bang Shin, Associate Professor, Geography and Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science
“The Political Economy of Speculative Urbanisation in East Asia”

Hyun Bang Shin is Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at London School of Economics and Political Science. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of speculative urbanisation, the politics of redevelopment and displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city, and mega-events as urban spectacles, with particular attention to Asian cities. His publications include an edited volume Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015) and a monograph Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016). His on-going book projects include a monograph Making China Urban (Routledge), and a co-edited volume Contesting Urban Space in East Asia (Palgrave Macmillan).

Panelists:
Laam Hae, Associate Professor, Political Science, York University
The “Construction State” Unbounded: Variegated Neoliberal Urbanization and Struggles over Greenbelt Deregulation in the Seoul Metropolitan Region
Jesook Song, Professor, Anthropology, Interim Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto
Dialogue of “Asia as Method” and Urban Studies: Hyunjang (Core-Location) and Social Humanities
Hae Yeon Choo, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Toronto
Speculative Self-making: Class Mobility, Homeownership, and Real Estate Investment in South Korea

Description

What is Asian Studies today, and where is it going? Join us for an open dialogue among faculty members affiliated with the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs as they discuss their visions for Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Representing disciplines from across the humanities and social sciences, panelists — who are the current leaders of specific programs within the Asian Institute — will reflect on the ways they understand the legacies of area studies in their own research, how they read contemporary re-articulations of state and non-state power, and what they anticipate to be key issues in the present and future of Asian Studies. They will also put this discussion into the context of their programming agendas at the Asian Institute.

Introductory Remarks: Ritu Birla, Former Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute; Associate Professor, Department of History

Reception to follow, please register.

Description

The word “culture” in English today gestures toward two distinct ideas: one of a universal hierarchy of values, embodied in canons of art and literature; and the other of a plurality of systems of value associated with different societies. In what was called the “culture life,” cosmopolitan intellectuals in Japan between the two world wars conceived a third sort of culture in an attempt to bridge Eurocentric hierarchy and local particularism. The idea also gained currency in colonial Korea. Although the “culture life” in Japan collapsed in the 1930s under the weight of its own idealism, it had a long life in Korea and saw a revival in Japan after the war. The unresolved dialectic between universal Culture and particular cultures was later absorbed into heritage protection policy under UNESCO, where Japan played an important role as one of the most powerful non-European participants. This lecture will show how a hybrid conception of culture was enabled by Japan’s position among the imperial powers, and how the fall of the Japanese empire and the dismantling of European colonial empires redefined what could be imagined under the rubric of culture.

Jordan Sand is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He holds a masters degree in architecture history from the University of Tokyo and a doctorate in history from Columbia University. His research focuses on material culture and the history of everyday life. He is the author of House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2004), Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013) and 帝国日本の生活空間 (Living Spaces of Imperial Japan; Iwanami shoten, 2015). He has also published on historical memory, museums and cultural heritage policy, and the history of food. He has served as visiting professor at Sophia University, the University of Tokyo, University of Michigan, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He is presently a visiting researcher at Waseda University working on a study of the history of slums in Tokyo and other Asian cities.

Description

Numbers came to define Chinese politics, until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Following Mao’s death and the Cultural Revolution’s ideological apotheosis, the Chinese Communist Party-led regime transformed an ideological organization into a pragmatic growth-promoting machine by limiting its vision of localities to just a few numbers, producing excellent performance on these measures and negative externalities elsewhere. This limited vision—GDP, fiscal revenue, investment—did not see important problems coming to plague Chinese society: most notably, pollution, corruption, and debt. The numbers failed to measure up in two ways. With increasing regularity, cases of officials juking the stats came to light, undermining internal and external faith in the reality of Chinese economic growth, but perhaps even more worryingly, the numbers were moving in the wrong direction—growth was slowing. China’s recent efforts on anti-corruption, centralization, and official calls for governing according to moral and national traditions are again reshaping the country’s politics and economy. As the costs of technocratic rule mounted, the center altered course, increasing monitoring of locals and promoting official morality among the officers of the party-state.

Jeremy Wallace is an associate professor of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on Chinese and authoritarian politics. His first book, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China, examines the ways that China has managed its growing cities to maintain order. His current book project, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarian Rule in China, explores how and why authoritarian regimes rule as they do. The book argues that numbers defined Chinese politics, until they failed to count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. He continues to work on the environmental, political, economic, and social issues of urbanization through Cornell’s Institute for Social Sciences project, China’s Cities: Divisions and Plans. His research website is http://www.jeremywallace.org.

Description

Language in Motion seeks to explore problems of translation, multilingualism and cultural identity, issues that are at the heart of critical theory, literary studies and comparative literature. It takes an expansive view of premodern literary cultures, with papers ranging from medieval Latin Europe, medieval Arabic and Hebrew writing on language, twelfth-century Japan, early modern South Asian Persian-Urdu interface, and medieval Romance vernacularity.

See the Language in Motion website for the full workshop schedule.

Sponsors: the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies; the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs; the Conference on Editorial Problems, St. Michael’s College; the Department of French; the Centre for Medieval Studies; the Northrop Frye Centre; the Centre for Comparative Literature; the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto; the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World; the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations; the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies; and the Department of East Asian Studies.

Description

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a “transborder redress culture.” A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique— of “comfort women” redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

Yoneyama is Professor of Women and Gender Studies Institute and Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto. She is the author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California Press, 1999), Violence, War, Redress: Politics of Multiculturalism (published in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2003), and a co-edited volume, Perilous Memories: Asia-Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001).

Books will be available for sale. Event runs 3 PM – 5 PM, reception follows.

Description

This talk offers a relational analysis of distinct yet linked forms of U.S. colonial domination in Asia and the Pacific rather than a focus on one form that tends to elide the other. It demonstrates how the nexus of U.S. militarism, imperialism, and settler colonialism – a conjunction theorized as settler modernity – is largely structured through temporal and spatial exceptions. The temporal exception takes the form of debt imperialism, a process through which the U.S. is able to roll over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conform to the homogenous time of repayment. The spatial exception, a locus in which forms of sovereignty at once proliferate and negate one another, is constituted through sites such as POW camps, refugee camps, military bases and camptowns, and unincorporated as well as incorporated territories. The talk focuses on the Korean War POW camp in particular through an analysis of Ha Jin’s novel War Trash.

Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and positions: asia critique.

Description

This presentation challenges the dominant approach to examining flooding through a case study of the 2011 Bangkok, Thailand floods, the fourth‐costliest disaster ever globally and which led to over 800 deaths. The alternative approach developed here views floods not only as outcomes of biophysical processes but also as products of political decisions, economic interests, and power relations. This approach illustrates how vulnerability to floods in Bangkok, which is a combination of exposure to floods and capacity to cope with them, and the extent to which floods are a disaster, are uneven at multiple scales across geographical and social landscapes. While the Chao Phraya River Basin received heavy rainfall in 2011, a number of human activities interacted with that rainfall to create the floods. This talk discusses how state actors together with unequal socioeconomic processes caused vulnerability to be unevenly distributed before, during, and after the event.

The event is presented as part of the Urban Climate Resilience Partnership in Southeast Asia (UCRSEA) at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Lunch will be provided.

Description

This paper traces the rise of environmental consciousness and movements in Korea after 1945. In particular, it locates the origins of environmentalism in rural Korea with agricultural farming communities and cooperatives, such as Hansalim, leading the way. In laying out their philosophies and practices, this paper shows how these agricultural-based movements embodied and materialized a form of anarchism. It concludes with a discussion on how their forms of an environmental-based anarchism has influenced contemporary drives for creating an alternative economy for social renewal.

Albert L. Park is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. As a historian of modern Korea and East Asia, his current research interest is centered on the relationship between culture and political economy and alternative forms of modernity. He is the author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea and is the co-editor of Encountering Modernity: Christianity and East Asia. His next research project examines the origins of environmental movements in modern Korea and their relationship to anarchism and democracy. Dr. Park is Co-Principal Investigator of EnviroLab Asia—a Henry Luce Foundation-funded initiative at the Claremont Colleges that studies environmental issues in Asia through an interdisciplinary lens. He is the recipient of three Fulbright Fellowships and fellowships from the Korea Foundation and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. A native of Chicago, he received his B.A. with honors from Northwestern University, an M.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.

Description

In attempting to understand early modern science and medicine from Chinese natural history to Manchu translations of bodily gesture and sensation, my work has placed the history and translation of metamorphic stories at its center. For our gathering – intended more as a conversation about craft than a formal talk – I will introduce recent work in which I have been expanding my practice to integrate short fiction and prose poetry as modes of reading and analyzing historical documents. The focus of my attention will be a new project called Metamorphoses that is loosely inspired by the work of Ovid and is devoted to creating stories of material transformation through creative readings and misreadings of primary source documents that derive from (or are oriented toward) early modern China.

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair of Early Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard, 2009) was a study of belief-making in early modern Chinese natural history through the lens of the Bencao gangmu (1596), a compendium of materia medica. Her current research explores practices and contexts of translation in the Ming and Qing periods.

Description

The roots of Hong Kong’s political crisis are deep. “One country-two systems” is in trouble. Alienated youth, identity politics, a strong absence of mutual understanding, unmet expectations on both sides, and Beijing’s fear of secessionism and foreign interference all intensify the dilemma, which the recent Legco elections have only deepened. Professor Zweig will provide an update on events in Hong Kong and discuss the road forward.

David Zweig is Chair Professor, Division of Social Science, and Director, Center on China’s Transnational Relations (www.cctr.ust.hk), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a Senior Research Fellow, Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada; 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 the Mainland 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, 2013-14, and in 2015 received a 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.”

Recent consultancies include reports for the Central Policy Unit (Government of Hong Kong), the Guangdong Provincial Government, Goldman Sachs, Handelsbank Capital Markets, Deutsche Bank and Shenzhen University.

Description

“Mega-FTAs” dominated the global trade agenda in the first half of the second decade of the 21st Century. Even before the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, it seemed that the era of Mega-FTAs would be short-lived—with both the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) encountering significant opposition. The Chinese and ASEAN-backed alternative to the TPP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), is the last of the Mega-FTAs standing. Until the demise of the TPP was confirmed, RCEP had received relatively little attention in the press or in the academic world. This presentation will focus on the factors shaping RCEP. In particular, through a comparison with the other Mega-FTAs, it examines how the structure of regional economic interdependence determines the content of mega trade agreements.

John Ravenhill is Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He was previously Head of the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is an editor of the Review of International Political Economy.

Description

Lecture Abstract: Japan has been engaged in development cooperation throughout the world since the 1950s. The initial efforts of development cooperation were made to augment and reinforce the postwar settlements with the countries invaded by Japan.  Japan’s development cooperation expanded quantitatively and geographically in the 1970s and 1980s.  Some of the projects conducted in this period illustrate Japan’s approach to international development cooperation, an approach that emphasizes both human capacity development and infrastructure building.  Reviewing the history of Japan’s activities globally, I discussed challenges Japan faces in the 21st century as a civilian power.

Speaker Biography: Akihiko Tanaka is Professor of International Politics at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University Tokyo.  He served as President of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) from April, 2012 to September, 2015.  He obtained his bachelor’s degree in International Relations at the University of Tokyo and Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has numerous books and articles on world politics and security issues in Japanese and English including The New Middle Ages: The World System in the 21st Century (Tokyo: The International House of Japan, 2002).  He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2012 for his academic achievements.

Description

All countries, large or small, rich or poor, suffer waste problems to various degrees. If not properly dealt with, waste issues could impose heavy environmental burdens which not only hinder economic growth but also lead to social discomfort. A sound strategic approach for effective waste management therefore is critical to finding an economically viable and environmentally sound solution.

Recently, a zero-waste concept has emerged worldwide as a new initiative to curtail the worsening waste problem. Realization of such a concept, however, necessitates the prevention and/or making the best use of the waste via workable mechanisms. Plausible measures include: waste minimization, waste reduction, reuse, recycle and recovery, cleaner production, eco-industrial networking, sustainable consumption and production, etc. The application of these measures, on the other hand, is case and location specific, requiring a careful consideration of many inter-related technical, regulatory, economic and social factors.

This presentation will review the background and challenges of the waste problem, ways and means of planning and implementing a zero-waste society, paradigm shift from waste to resource management, innovation and partnership, and key elements of success or failure with discussion on the exemplary case of Taiwan.

Zero waste: is it a fictional or achievable goal? This is an open question that we must address, to help build a sound foundation for pursuance of sustainability.

Professor Chih C. Chao is a former Vice President of Tunghai University, Taiwan and received his PhD from the University of Montreal. Trained as a chemical and environmental engineer, Dr. Chao has a grave concern over the social and environmental impacts that are caused by un-thoughtful economic activities. Recently, he has worked extensively with natural and social scientists to search for and implement feasible approaches that will lead to establishment of sustainable low-carbon circular economic systems. Dr. Chao has over 40 years’ experience in North America, EU and Asia, covering a wide spectrum of sustainability driven issues. His most recent focal interest is in facilitating the development of value-added zero-waste systems, with a goal of maximizing material and energy use efficiency and minimizing the natural resource exploitation, towards a low-carbon society.