Description

6:00 PM – 7:00 PM – Reception
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM – Main Program

Taiwan’s young democracy continues to be dynamic, energetic and indeed a model for other Asian democracies. The 2016 elections represent another watershed moment in Taiwan’s politics, as the contest will elect a new President and a re-configured Legislative Yuan. After a two-term Presidency under Ma Ying-Jeou, Taiwan continues to be a vibrant economy, with deepened linkages across the Strait and with other countries in the region. Taiwan has managed Cross-Strait relations well, though recent developments portend challenges on the horizon. The consolidation of the Xi administration in Beijing will have implications on China-Taiwan relations. The recent Sunflower movement highlights not only a resurgent Taiwanese identity politics, but also an emerging divide across Taiwan’s older and younger voters. The recent efforts by the Kuomintang to rejuvenate its electoral base by changing the party’s Presidential candidate suggests the ruling party is in the midst of transition itself. And yet amidst these challenges, Taiwan remains a beacon of democracy. This post-election panel, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs, will feature leading scholars of Taiwan from Canada, the US and Taiwan. Panelists will offer their reflections and observations on the current state of Taiwan’s politics and the future of Taiwan’s political and economic development.

Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics, Chair of Chinese Studies and Assistant Dean for Educational Policy at Davidson College. She has a PhD in Government from Harvard and a BA from Princeton. Rigger is the author of Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy, From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, “Taiwan’s Rising Rationalism: Generations, Politics and ‘Taiwan Nationalism,’” and Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse.

Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang is professor at Institute of Strategic Studies of Tamkang University, Founder and Chairman of the Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies. He previously served as Deputy Minister of the Mainland Affairs Council in the ROC (Taiwan) Government. Dr. Huang received his doctoral degree form the George Washington University.

Joseph Wong is the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School, Professor and Canada Research Chair in the department of Political Science. Professor Wong has conducted research and written extensively on Taiwan politics.

Description

How do we interpret the changing landscape in international politics with a rising China in the background? What do we understand about China as a complex bilateral and multilateral partner?

Moving Forward: 45 Years of Canada-China Relations is a policy report with analytical depth on broader issues as well as investigating specific issues, embodying a new approach that is more focused, strategic but cautious enough to consider the inevitable associated challenges between Canada-China relations. This launch event includes presentations by the authors, and discussions promising an intellectual but frank insight on Canada-China relations, including health cooperation, bilateral investments, youth and people-to-people engagements, and geopolitical disputes.

P R O G R A M

11:00-11:30 Welcome and introduction and launch of Moving Forward
Joseph Wong, Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

11:30-12:40 Panel 1: New Approach, Trade, Business in China, Investment in Oil Sands, Youth Engagements

Wendy Dobson, Professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Pitman Potter, Professor, University of British Columbia
Anton Malkin, PhD Candidate, Balsillie School of International Affairs
Scott McKnight, PhD Student, Political Science, University of Toronto
Lynette Ong, Professor, Political Science and Asian Institute, University of Toronto (video presentation)
James Flynn, Undergraduate Student and Rhodes Scholar, Political Science and Economics, University of Toronto

12:40-1:10 Lunch Break

1:10-2:20 Panel 2: Strategic Partnership, South China Sea, Health Cooperation, P2P Relations

David Dewitt, University Professor, Political Science, York University
David Zakus, Professor of Distinction in Global Health in the Faculty of Community Services, School of Occupational and Public Health, Ryerson University
Lotus Ruan, Master’s Student, Asia-Pacific Policy Studies, University of British Columbia
Karl Yan, PhD Student, Political Science, University of Toronto
Jeremy Paltiel, Professor, Political Science, Carleton University

Moderator for both panels:
David Mulroney, President, University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto; Former Ambassador of Canada to China

2:20 – 2:30 Conclusion

Description

This symposium aims to widen and sharpen debates about the politics of humanitarianism and development by reflecting on the devastating 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. The symposium focuses on Nepal to pose broad questions that engage public conversations in the social sciences and politically-engaged humanities on the histories of post-colonial states, their administrative architectures, and global geographies and technologies of humanitarianism. Key questions for discussion include: Who responded, and in what ways? How does seismic instability articulate political power and instability? How was Nepal “territorialized” for and by earthquake relief? What tensions arise in the mix of differently scaled responses, between solidarity and inequality, assistance and domination, progressive and regressive possibilities? What, crucially, is, or could be, the role of the critical humanities and social sciences in troubling and refining the humanitarian present?

The proceedings are organized to facilitate discussion among scholars, development practitioners, and policy makers, and will feature cross-regional perspectives from other Asian contexts. Registered participants are invited to join a lunch, followed by an afternoon workshop hosted by the Toronto-based network, Asha (Hope) Toronto, oriented to exploring strategies for promoting aid accountability and critical social science in and for Nepal, and in the thought and application of disaster relief and the dispensing of humanitarian projects more broadly.

Schedule

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM          Welcome and Introductions
Professor Ritu Birla, Richard Charles Lee Director, Asian Institute Professor Katharine Rankin, Interim Director, Centre for South Asian Studies
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM        Panel 1: Fissures and Solidarities
Professor Kathryn March, Cornell University, “Failure in Nepal? Seismicity, the contradictory state and local social potential”
Manjushree Thapa, Writer,  “Cognitive Dissonance, Narrative Incoherence: Nepal’s Story”
Discussant: Professor Jennifer Chun, Centre for the Study of South Korea, University of Toronto
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM        Panel 2:  A Role for Critical Social Science?
Professor Sara Shneiderman, University of British Columbia, “Restructuring Kinship, Citizenship and Territory in the wake of the Nepal earthquakes: Affective and political possibilities”
James Sharrock, researcher and development consultant, Ithaca, NY; formerly with DFID, UN, and The Carter Centre, Nepal, “Remote response: International humanitarianism and Nepal’s 2015 earthquakes”
Discussant: Professor Ito Peng, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM           Lunch Break
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM          Workshop
Asha Toronto—Strategies for promoting aid accountability and critical social science in and 

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Description

Why draw a story? How can visual language and representation upend mainstream conventions about immigrant workers, women, and other groups, or tell stories that might otherwise be hard to communicate? How does drawing and graphic storytelling go where others cannot go?

Comics have long had a place in underground subcultures, exploring taboo subjects with a subversive flair – but they also have an increasing role in sharing the experiences of those who might not want to be caught on camera, or whose stories defy traditional media tools.

Sukjong Hong, a New York-based writer and artist who works in the medium of comics, among others, will share the process behind making comics and graphic journalism about worker organizing, Cold War myths, and immigrant communities. She will also share examples of independent South Korean comic artists whose work addresses displacement, labor rights, and militarism in social movement contexts in South Korea.

Speaker Bio:
Sukjong Hong is a writer and artist working on graphic journalism and oral history-based multi-media performances. Her writing and graphic journalism has appeared in Fusion News, Al Jazeera America, The Huffington Post, Gothamist, and Triple Canopy Magazine, among others. She is currently working on a series of graphic novellas about the multi-generational impact of the Korean War.

After the presentation, Professor Ju Hui Judy Han (Geography, UofT) will facilitate a discussion about ways of reading and incorporating comics, visual exercises, and drawing into critical pedagogy and community organizing. Faculty, graduate students, artists, and activists are all welcome!

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Contested Embrace is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the complex relationships among the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided over the course of the twentieth century. The book focuses theoretically on how seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices contribute to the making, unmaking, and remaking of the “homeland” state and the “transborder nation”: by constituting the conceptual grid through which a state identifies and enumerates “its” transborder population and mobilizes them for its own agendas; by mediating the reiterative encounters between the state and “its” transborder population, and thereby shaping the vernacular idioms of self-identification of the latter; and by leaving durable documentary traces, to which a state turns to validate the claims to national belonging of those whose long defunct ties to their “homeland” seem ambiguous or suspicious. The talk will flesh out these claims through the analysis of (1) South Korea’s effort to create its own docile citizens out of ethnic Koreans in Japan in the fierce competition with North Korea; and (2) South Korea’s effort to control its territorial and membership boundary from ethnic Korean “return” migrants from China.

Jaeeun Kim is an assistant professor in sociology at the University of Michigan. She specializes in political sociology, ethnicity and nationalism, and international migration and globalization in East Asia and beyond. She has published her work in various academic journals. Her first book, Contested Embrace, based on her award-winning dissertation, will come out at Stanford University Press in April 2016.

Description

The event is open graduate students and faculty only.

This panel is part of the Centre for South Asian Studies PhD Seminar Series, involving core CSAS faculty as discussants and chairs.
The aim is to workshop the papers through discussion with colleagues.

Elsie Lewison, “Reframing Agricultural Biopolitics through a Postcolonial Lens: Contested organic value chains in Jumla, Nepal”

Signs and stories of the failures of the state are both potent and pervasive in Nepal, particularly in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes and the highly contested passing of a constitution. However, the all too easy critique of the state and its compounding failures presents something of a dilemma as well, particularly as efforts to bypass dysfunctional states are often framed in terms of a “neoliberal turn.” In this paper, I draw on post-colonial critiques and calls for a “dis-aggregated” approach to the state in an effort to explore some of the everyday ways in which actors work across institutional boundaries and in the interstices of the Nepali state in pursuit of biopolitical aims. I focus in on development interventions to promote organic value chains in a “remote” corner of Nepal, highlighting how state and non-state actors, at the district scale, have mobilized technologies and institutions of value chain development in ways that deviate significantly from the agendas of donor agencies and Kathmandu-based officers. Through this investigation, I suggest that a post-colonial perspective can be useful in identifying potential openings for pursuing alternative agrarian futures.

Sujata Thapa, “Infrastructure Violence: Daily mobility of women in public transportation in Kathmandu City”

Many South Asian cities are adopting a technocratic approach to urban development to attract global capital. These cities are dramatically changing their built environment with modern infrastructure such as the metro rail, multi-lane motorways, shopping malls, high rises, and luxury hotels. The growth in manufacturing, construction and service sector jobs in these cities has attracted poor people from villages and small towns, leading to rapid increase in the urban population as well as urbanization in the peri-urban areas of the city. It is in this context that infrastructure development of Kathmandu Metropolitan city has taken place during the post-conflict reconstruction phase since 2008.

In this review paper, I critically examine the transportation infrastructure projects that have been implemented in Kathmandu to explore the linkage between infrastructure and the broader process of marginalization. The malfunctioning or the lack of infrastructure inflicts harm or violence. Lack of adequate and thoughtful planning has also given rise to a transportation system dominated by motorized private vehicles. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastructural violence,’ I aim to show the current transportation infrastructure often marginalizes poor people in general and women in particular. For example, both the inadequacy of transportation infrastructure and the predominance of private motorized vehicles disadvantage these groups disproportionately. I make this argument through the analyses of infrastructure policies of municipal government, donor agencies, multi-national companies and national and international government. The paper concludes with a set of normative ideas to imagine and build urban infrastructure differently for greater equality and collective benefit.

Description

In the spring of 1701, a daimyō from western Japan drew his sword against a senior shogunal official within the hallowed halls of Edo Castle. This rash, split-second decision set in motion a dramatic chain of events that is retold in a theatrical masterpiece that remains one of Japan’s most captivating and enduring cultural markers: Chūshingura, the story of the forty-seven rōnin.

Chūshingura enjoyed immediate success on stage and quickly captured the Japanese popular imagination, inspiring all manner of imitators, adaptations, and parodies. This talk introduces several works of comic pictorial fiction based on the Chūshingura story and considers their significance as products of the flourishing literary culture of early modern Japan.

William Fleming is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures & Theater Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century Japanese fiction and the popular stage. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University, and was a visiting researcher at Kyoto University and Tokyo’s National Institute of Japanese Literature.

Description

Through this hands on workshop, students will:

-Design a project idea using results-based management tools
-Use project management tools and frameworks that will support the lifecycle of the project
-Design workflow and business processes to ensure team members are using the project management tools

Note: this workshop is for University of Toronto undergraduate and graduate students only

Carissa MacLennan is the project manager on the Digital Public Square project of the Munk School of Global Affairs. Carissa has designed and managed domestic and international programs that span conservation, community development, human rights and education. Prior to the Digital Public Square, Carissa worked with the Jane Goodall Institute, UNICEF Canada, and Journalists for Human Rights.

RICHARD CHARLES LEE BIG IDEAS COMPETITION
We’re looking for bright, motivated undergraduate and graduate students in the Faculty of Arts and Science with ideas for impactful projects with a focus on Asia. This is a chance to think outside the box, to apply your classroom learning to the real world in a meaningful way. Students will train to win through a series of expert-led workshops. In April, individuals and teams will pitch their ideas before a jury of faculty members and industry experts, competing for the prize to fund their projects.

More Information: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/bigideas/

Description

Since 2011, Myanmar has begun a transition to civilian and democratic rule. The 2015 elections have further confirmed Myanmar’s transition to democracy, with the victory of the National League for Democracy. Yet, peace with ethnic nationalities and new institutional powers for ethnic states remain elusive. Under the 2008 Constitution, very few powers were devolved to ethnic states. How are ethnic states gaining more powers from the central government? How are new powers being negotiated? What are the prospects for greater devolution of power to ethnic states? The panel will focus on the fundamental contradictions between the central government’s historically persistent centralizing approach and its stated objective of devolving power to ethnic states. Since 2012, changes remain primarily cosmetic rather than substantive. Although the government has pledged support for federalism, has negotiated a national cease-fire, and has introduced a new decentralization law in the national parliament, there is little evidence so far of a willingness to amend the 2008 Constitution to give more autonomy and power to ethnic states or, in practice, to provide sufficient powers and resources for ethnic states to exercise any meaningful degree of autonomy. The panel will also discuss the rise of violence against Muslims. These represent important challenges as the National League for Democracy forms a new government, and attempts to find new solutions to the sixty-year civil war with ethnic groups and achieve peaceful democratic change.

Description

The talk will consider various examples of the region’s memory wars and interrogate the possibilities for the production of history in the mix. Of particular concern is the matter of the islands in the region left up for grabs in the Treaty of Peace with Japan, signed in San Francisco in 1951. Through claims to these islands today, the memory wars have the potential to spark actual conflict and render treacherous the ongoing political manipulation of both victims and survivors of the Japanese Empire.

Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She publishes regularly about Japan and Northeast Asia, and her books include Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia) and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (Hawaii). Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC and fellowships at Princeton and Harvard and is the recipient of the 2015 Manhae Peace Prize. She is currently completing a book about Japan’s territorial problems called, The Shape of Japan: Islands, Empire, Nation (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

She is on the advisory council of Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies’ Research Project on Constitutional Revision and was the recipient of the Chosun Ilbo’s 2015 Manhae Peace Prize.

Description

This discussion will draw on Appadurai’s work on Max Weber to ask how we can build on his important efforts to understand India and
China as sites of what he saw as stunted capitalist potential. What have we learned since Weber’s lifetime about comparison, context
and capital that might allow us to assess Asian capitalism better than Weber (especially in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
but also in his work on Economy and Society) was able to do?

Arjun Appadurai is Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Dr. Appadurai is a socialcultural
anthropologist and a worldrenowned expert on the cultural dynamics of globalization. He is the author of The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: 1988), as well as numerous other books on topics ranging across globalization, gender issues, modernity, and worship, often with focus on India and southeast Asia. His latest book is The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso: 2013). He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

» Registration is required:
https://arjunappaduraiatai.eventbrite.ca
Lunch will be served

Description

Situated in East Asia where the power relationship is undergoing a substantial transformation, Japan must adapt itself to the new realities of the security environment of the region. China, with its aggressive expansion both politically and militarily is posing to seize the hegemony in the South and East China Sea, further advancing into the Pacific Ocean.

North Korea will continue its nuclear test and missile launch as much as needed until the country becomes capable of covering the North American Continent with its nuclear missiles.

Prime Minister Abe of Japan last year enacted a new set of security laws enabling Japan to exercise the collective right of defense. While Japan’s Peace Constitution remains intact, the new legislation will widen the scope of Japan’s contribution to international peace building activities. For Japan to lead the regional security cooperation, it has to come to terms with the neighboring countries about “the issue of history”, without which the basis on which Japan stands to engage with the neighboring countries will remain to be vulnerable. How can Japan come to reconciliation with its neighbors?

Yukio OKAMOTO, a former Special Advisor to two Prime Ministers of Japan, is the President of Okamoto Associates and a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at MIT. From 1968 to 1991 Mr. Okamoto was a career diplomat in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His overseas postings were at Paris, Cairo and Washington. He retired from the Ministry in 1991 and established Okamoto Associates Inc., a political and economic consultancy.

Post-retirement, Mr. Okamoto has served in a number of advisory positions. From 1996 to 1998, he was a Special Advisor to Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. From 2001 to 2004, he was again a Special Advisor to Prime Minister Jun-ichiro Koizumi, also serving as the Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Okamoto is a visiting professor of international relations at Ritsumeikan University. He sits on the Board of several Japanese multinational companies. Mr. Okamoto is the Director of the Signal of Hope Fund, an initiative he established to assist the Tohoku fisheries industry recover from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Description

9:00-9:45 Registration and coffee

9:45-10:00 Opening remarks

Jill Ross, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

10:00-11:30 Translation

Linguistic Markedness in Translation: Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros
Mélissa Gélinas – Comparative Literature, University of Michigan (USA)

I Make Myself the Cave to Catch your Echo: Three Poetics of Translation
Fan Wu – Independent Scholar

Translation as a Lens for Cultural Negotiation
Paula Karger – Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

11:30-13:00 Identities

‘What I Wanted to Wear’: The Battle for Self-Expression Amidst Transphobic Street Violence
Anna Kozak – Literatures of Modernity, Ryerson University

Transcending Race: Suheir Hammad’s Construction of Black(ness)
Denijal Jegić – Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
(Germany)

Black Transhumanism, Technoculture, and New Negro Modernity: Afro-postmodern politics of
race in George Schuyler’s Black No More
Myungsung Kim – English, Arizona State University (USA)

13:00-14:30 Break with lunch

14:30-16:00 Trans- en français

Transcription du Sourd: La trace du corps dans la langue
Lisanne Larivière – Litérature Comparée, Université de Montréal

Récits transmis, mélangés, différés: quelques adaptations cinématographiques de romans à tiroirs
Jessy Neau – French, University of Western Ontario/Université de Poitiers

Postcolonial Space in a Global Network: Trans-national connexions in the French banlieue
Christina Horvath – French, University of Bath (UK)

16:00-17:00 Break with snacks

17:00-18:30 Keynote Address I

Operatic Transformation: Translation, Adaptation, Transladaptation
Linda and Michael Hutcheon – English, Comparative Literature and Medicine, University of
Toronto

18:30 Wine and cheese social with cello and viola da gamba performance by Felix Deak of the IFURIOSI Baroque Ensemble
Centre for Comparative Literature
Isabella Bader Theatre, 3rd Floor
93 Charles Street West, Toronto

20:30 Theatre Performance – In Sundry Languages
** Registration required
Luella Massey Studio Theatre
4 Glen Morris Street, Toronto

Description

All panels are held in Alumni Hall, Room 112, Victoria College, unless otherwise indicated

8:30-9:00 Coffee and snacks

9:00-10:30 Cinema

Sensuous Translation: The Dubbed Foreign Film in 1950’s China
Thomas Chen – Comparative Literature, University of California Los Angeles (USA)

Transparent Mediums: Ghosts in Post-War Japan
Darcy Gauthier – Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Images traversing texts
Karin Janker – Languages and Literatures, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany)

10:30-12:00 Aesthetics

Lunarian Transcendence: bill bissett’s Language as Poetic Resistance to Mental Ableism
Andrew McEwan – Interdisciplinary Humanities, Brock University

Immanence and Transcendence in Aestheticism
Katie Fry – Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Transmediality, Remediation, and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Hypermediacy and the recent work of
Dana Claxton and Jennifer Chan

Julia Polyck-O’Neill – Interdisciplinary Humanities, Brock University

10:30-12:15 Literature and Critical Theory (Undergraduate Panel)
** Held in Room 215, Victoria College

Translating the Object Oriented Ontology into Theology: A Calvinist Account of Realist Magic
Ella Wilhelm – Literature and Critical Theory, University of Toronto

Talmudic Transformation: ‘Niddah’
Tova Benjamin – Literature and Critical Theory, University of Toronto

On Transgression, by way of the Odyssey
Khashayar Zayyani – Literature and Critical Theory, University of Toronto

Transience in Oedipus the King
Lorina Hoxha – Literature and Critical Theory, University of Toronto

12:15-13:30 Break with lunch

13:30-15:00 Keynote Address II

Salvaging Israel/Palestine: Art, Collaboration, and the Binational State
W. J. T. Mitchell – English and Art History, University of Chicago (USA)

15:00-16:30 Mobility

Ecstasy of the Road: Play-Space and Desire in Nabokov’s Lolita and Cortázar’s Hopscotch
Ivan Babanovski – English, University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)

Transnational Outlaw-Lawman: Ralph Connor and His Border Crossing
Joel Deshaye – English, Memorial University

“I fight mine legacy, mine curse”: transgressive transnational poetics in the works of Cathy Park
Hong
Héloïse Thomas-Cambonie – Études des mondes anglophones, Université Bordeaux Montaigne

16:30-17:00 Break with snacks

17:00-18:30 Keynote Address III

Edging, Drawing, the Common
John Paul Ricco – Comparative Literature, Art History, and Visual Culture, University of Toronto

18:30-19:30 Screening of Akin by Chase Joynt & Discussion

Chase Joynt – Film, York University
Hannah Dyer – Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University
Dina Georgis – Women & Gender Studies, University of Toronto

19:30 Closing remarks

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

In a recent anthology of essays titled, How Theravāda is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities (Silkworm Press 2012), contributors ranging from philologists, anthropologists and area studies specialists of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism have challenged the use of the term Theravāda (Teachings of the Elders) as a legitimate designation of identity by and for the Buddhists of Sri Lanka and the religiously affiliated countries of mainland Southeast Asia. The claim made in these writings is that “Theravāda” emerged as a term of self-reference only during the late colonial era as a product of Orientalist scholarship, and that by accepting this contrived and essentialized identity Buddhists of the region have unwittingly participated in the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of their own multiple and complex Buddhist traditions that collectively go by the name Theravāda today. In this presentation I will challenge that claim along with the methodology and evidence brought to bear in its support. Then, referencing mostly Burmese sources, I will show how in Burma use of the word Theravāda as a term of self-reference pre-dates British conquest and the rise of Orientalism, and further, that contemporary meanings of the word Theravāda in Burma are not incongruous with attested usages in the past.

Patrick Pranke is an Assistant Professor of Religion in the Humanities at the University of Louisville. He is trained in Buddhist Studies and his area of specialization is Burmese Buddhism. Pranke’s interests include Buddhist monastic history and historiography, weikza cult practices, and the interface of Buddhist scholasticism with Burmese popular traditions. Pranke’s recent publications include: “Buddhist Foundation Legends” (co-authored with Donald Stadtner), and “Buddhism in Myanmar” in The Buddhist Art of Myanmar (Asia Society and Yale University Press, 2015); “On Saints and Wizards: Ideals of Human Perfection and Power in Contemporary Burmese Buddhism,” in Champions of Buddhism: Weikza Cults in Contemporary Burma (NUS Press 2014); and Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Assistant Editor, (Princeton University Press. 2014).

Description

Please join scholars of South Asia from UofT, York, Waterloo and Carleton for a discussion on freedom of speech and the public sphere in contemporary India: the JNU crisis and threats to cultural and educational institutions; the targeting of Dalits and the events leading to the suicide of Rohith Vemula; Islamophobia and the situation in Kashmir. The event aims to foster a cross-regional, interdisciplinary, and public conversation on the university’s role as a space for critical thinking and minority voices. All are welcome.

Idrisa Pandit is the Associate Professor and Director of the Studies in Islam, an interdisciplinary program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. Idrisa is a native of Kashmir and lives in Waterloo. Idrisa is passionate about issues of social justice, interfaith dialogue, and peacebuilding. For combining her scholarship with social activism, Idrisa was named Woman of the Year, Oktober Fest 2015.

Chinnaiah Jangam is a historian specializing in modern South Asia. He finished his Ph. D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, UK in 2005 and his thesis focused on the intellectual and political writings of Dalits against caste inequality and oppression in colonial South India. Currently he is working on a monograph based on his Ph. D. thesis entitled “ earnings from the Margins: Dalits and the Making of Modern India.” He is keenly interested in issues of social justice, human rights, self-respect and dignity, democracy and citizenship. Dr. Jangam has been the recipient of Felix Scholarship for doctoral studies in England. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at New York University.

Malavika Kasturi teaches in the area of modern South Asia in the Department of History. She is also graduate faculty at the the Department for the Study of Religion. She finished her B.A. and M.A at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and received her PhD at Cambridge University. Her research interests include the histories of gender and kinship, law and legal history, and their interface with religion in modern South Asia. Dr Kasturi’s first monograph, Embattled Identities, Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth Century Colonial North India (Oxford University Press, 2002) analysed the reconstitution of the family and martial masculinities amongst elite lineages in British India, against the backdrop of colonial ideologies, political culture and material realities. In this context, Dr. Kasturi has also written about how kinship hierarchies in a variety of contexts were restructured in conversation with colonial legal discourses on property, succession and inheritance. Her research project, ‘Crafting Hindu Publics: Ritual, Religiosity and the Public Sphere in Twentieth Century India’ explores the role orthodox Hindus socio-religious reformers have given to sacred space and ‘everyday’ socio-religious ritual practices in constituting and shaping civil society projects in colonial and postcolonial India. Dr Kasturi’s articles have appeared in edited collections and in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Studies in History and The Indian Journal of Gender Studies.

Description

In May 2015, representatives of the Taliban secretly met with Afghan, Chinese and Pakistani officials in the autonomous Chinese region of Urumqi, Xinjiang Uygur. The meeting was reported to be part of the preliminary consultations regarding the beginning of full-fledged negotiations between all parties.

This renewal in diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and China, India, and Pakistan comes in the wake of signing the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) in 2014 and the subsequent drawback of US military personnel and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Since then, regional interest parties in the region, such as China, India, and Pakistan are becoming more actively involved in Afghanistan’s recovery through multilateral venues such as the Istanbul Process and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). In particular, China’s growing capabilities, its desire for regional stability, and its geographic proximity to Afghanistan make it well placed to play a positive role in Afghanistan’s reconstruction.

This panel aims to examine the role of China, India, and Pakistan in the reconstruction of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2014 and the respective geopolitical implications it has in the Central and South Asia region.

Description

In 1940, students of the Medical Department at Keijō Imperial University set out to investigate the health and living conditions of urban residents in what were perceived as the ghettos of Seoul (Keijō). Called the t’omangmin, these new urban residents whose burgeoning numbers and needs the infrastructure of Seoul was unable to handle were considered part of the “population problem,” as categorized by colonial authorities. Juxtaposing this with other research projects, the presentation explores the rhetoric of love and cooperation in a purportedly scientific investigation to interrogate medical activities and health administration in the context of Seoul’s urban development and expansion of Japanese military expeditions during the Pacific War.

Sonja M. Kim is Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY) where she teaches courses on Korean history and East Asia. Her research interests are on issues of gender, medicine, and public health in 20th century Korea.

Description

The current Syrian crisis has alerted us once again to the plight of the tens of millions of displaced people who in recent times have been forced to seek refuge from political persecution, wars, and violence. Yet too often mainstream representations of generic “refugees” have figured them as merely objects of pity and benevolence, or in the worst cases into populations whose diasporic condition is in part a result of their own inability to survive in the modern and contemporary world. This symposium takes last year’s fortieth anniversary of the official end of the Vietnam War as an occasion to question mainstream memories and representations of the wars in Southeast Asia, while also calling attention to the resilience, alternative memories, and self-making of those who have relocated to the United States and Canada.

1:00 PM – 2:45 PM – Dr. David Chu Distinguished Visitor Lecture
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Panel Discussion
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM – Reception

The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es): The Production of Memories of the “Generation
After”

Yen Le Espiritu, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Focusing on the multiple recollections of the US War in Vietnam, this talk examines the ways in which the mutually constituted processes of remembering and forgetting work in the production of official discourses about empire, war, and violence as well as in the construction of refugee subjectivities. Challenging conventional ideas about memory as recuperation, this talk analyzes the production of the “postmemories” of the post-1975 generation: the young Vietnamese who were born in Vietnam or in the United States after the official end of the Vietnam War.

Please note that the lecture and panel each require a separate registration.

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Wang Zheng is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History and Associate Scientist of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. She is the author and editor of Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, Translating Feminisms in China, and Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. Her new book Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2016.

A long-term academic activist promoting gender studies in China, she is the founder and co-director of the University of Michigan-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies. She has also authored two books and co-edited nine volumes on feminism and gender studies in Chinese.

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The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scholars studying Indonesia to write about and reflect upon infrastructures in Indonesia. The papers being presented will address questions of power and control, access and citizenship, and the dynamics between the changing materialities of infrastructures and the changing meanings and interpretations that emerge alongside these new forms. This workshop is part of a SSHRC-funded research project entitled “Urban Infrastructures and Informal Sovereignties: Understanding 21st Century Politics”.

Indonesian Infrastructures:
Politics, Poetics, Plans
Friday, March 18, 2016
11:00 am to 12:00 pm Welcome and Brunch
Location: room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place

12:00 pm to 2:00 pm The Make+Shift: Transforming Urban Popular Economies
Abdou Maliq Simone
Location: SS 2127, 100 St. George St.

2:15 pm to 3:00 pm Infrastructure and Superstructure (20 minutes)
Joshua Barker
Discussion of Sheri’s Gibbing’s Theoretical Introduction
Location: room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place

3:00 pm to 3:15 pm

Coffee Break
Location: 208N, 1 Devonshire Place
3:15 pm to 4:15 pm Discussion of Abidin Kusno’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Lukas Ley

4:15 pm to 5:15pm Discussion of Lukas Ley’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Johan Lindquist

7:00 pm
Dinner at Banjara
Location: 796 Bloor Street West, Toronto
Saturday March 19th, 2016
8:00 am to 9:00 am
Breakfast
Location: 208N, 1 Devonshire Place
9:00 am to 10:00 am Discussion of Jeremy Kingsley’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Joshua Barker

10:00 am to 10:15 Coffee Break
Location: room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place
10:15 am to 11:00 am Discussion of Johan Lindquist’s Paper
Lead Discussants: Sheri Gibbings and Emily Hertzman

11:00 am to 12:00 pm Discussion of Jacob Nerenberg’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Jeremy Kingsley

12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Lunch
Location: 202N, 1 Devonshire Place

1:00 pm to 2:00 pm Discussion of Tammara Soma’s Paper
Leading Discussant: Rina Priyani

2:00 pm to 3:00 pm Discussion of Sheri Gibbings and Emily Hertzman’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Doreen Lee

3:00 pm to 3:15 Coffee Break
Location: 208N, 1 Devonshire Place

3:15 pm to 4:15 pm Discussion of Merlyna Lim’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Jacob Nerenberg

4:15 pm to 5:15 pm Discussion of Jessika Tremblay’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Merlyna Lim

Sunday, March 20th, 2016
8:00 am to 9:00 am Breakfast
Location: 208N

9:00 am to 10:00 am Discussion of Rina Priyanyi’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Abidin Kusno

10:00 am to 10:15 am Coffee Break
Location: 208N, 1 Devonshire Place

10:15 am to 11:15 am Discussion of Doreen Lee’s Paper
Lead Discussant: Jessika Tremblay

11:15 am to 12:15 pm
Discussion of the major themes of the workshop

12:15 pm to 1:15 pm
Lunch
Location: room 202N, 1 Devonshire Place

Conveners:
Sheri Lynn Gibbings
Joshua Barker

Friday, March 18th – Sunday March 20th

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South Korea is currently listed as a tier 1 country under the US State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report. In 2001, when it was ranked a Tier 3 country as a source and transit country, South Korean government tried diligently to improve its image in many ways. It adopted the Act on the Punishment of Acts of Arranging Sexual Traffic in 2004 that punishes the solicitation of sex, transformed pre-existing law, and, in 2013, amended provisions in the Criminal Act which broadened the definition of trafficking to include labour trafficking as well. The protection of the victims and witnesses, however, is still quite weak, and a constitutional challenge on the legality of the punishments has been raised. The ratification bill for the Palermo Protocol submitted by the Government on July 10, 2014, is still pending. Professor Baik reviews the light and shadow of the fights against human trafficking in Korea, and discusses the role of law and social morality.

Dr. Tae-Ung Baik is an Associate Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He teaches international human rights law, comparative law, and Korean law. Dr. Baik was appointed a mandate-holder of Special Procedure of the UN Human Rights Council in 2015 as a member of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID). He earned his Master’s (LL.M.) and Doctoral (JSD) degrees from Notre Dame Law School, and is an attorney at-law in the State of New York. His book, “Emerging Regional Human Rights Systems in Asia,” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.

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Climate change is having an impact on the severity and timing of river level fluctuations across Asia (Tanner et al 2009, Xu et al 2009, Palmer et al 2008, Dudgeon 2000). Flooding and flood-related disasters in mainland Southeast Asia make news around the world and are generating increasingly severe economic and political disruptions as they impact an urbanizing region. In Myanmar—a so called “water hotspot”—flooding is considered a crisis for state water management and governance, particularly in urban contexts. Moreover, in work on water and resilience, alongside an emphasis on ‘crisis’, we have seen water continually linked to scarcity and ‘disaster’ (Tanner et. al 2015, Mukheibir 2010). What these debates could better elucidate are the ways that everyday people work to address hydro-social practices in a changing climate, and the implications of this work for water management and social outcomes (Driscoll Derickson and MacKinnon 2015, MacKinnon Derickson 2013, ISET-I 2015).

One way that we can better understand the impacts of climate change on water and river fluctuations and take an approach that highlights the work of everyday people is to examine the impacts or changes to beneficial flooding and to its associated agro-ecological practices in mainland Southeast Asia, where the monsoon climate and regular flooding have been adapted by residents into local cultivation practices. In the places where flood-linked agriculture is practiced, the challenges and transformations posed by climate changes interact with both the current processes of urbanization and with historical and traditional technologies that have been developed to ‘harness’ river fluctuations. Riverbank gardening is one such hydro-social practice in Southeast Asia that produces food for/from both rural and urbanizing environments, and requires cultivators to understand and work around a river’s fluctuating water levels, the rise and fall of which shapes local ecologies, climate and the growing season.

This paper/presentation investigates the practices of riverbank gardeners in urbanizing monsoon landscapes as one way to understand changes to beneficial flooding as related to both climate change and the multifaceted processes and impacts of urbanization. I draw on a framework that emphasizes the historical emergence of such practices, their contemporary challenges, and the role of everyday people in their management. Drawing three examples together, I argue that examination of these gardeners’ practices and strategies of ‘resourcefulness’ reveal the work of individuals and institutions governing overlooked in-between spaces—which might otherwise be described as ‘un-governed’ or ‘ungovernable’—in everyday practice. I argue that these spaces are being adaptively managed and governed by local residents, in connection with municipal (and other) authorities.

Vanessa Lamb is postdoctoral researcher with the Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia (UCRSEA) project and is an affiliated researcher with the York Centre for Asian Research, York University (Toronto, Canada). She has worked and conducted research in Southeast Asia on natural resource access for the past 10 years. Dr. Lamb completed her dissertation, Ecologies of Rule and Resistance, focused on the politics of ecological knowledge and development of the Salween River at York University’s Department of Geography. She was recently awarded an ASEAN-Canada Junior Fellowship for continued Research on water politics and transboundary environmental governance in Southeast Asia. Dr. Lamb is also the lead PI for a new CGIAR WLE Greater Mekong project on water governance titled: Matching policies, institutions and practices of water governance in the Salween-Thanlwin-Nu River Basin: Towards inclusive, informed, and accountable water governance.

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In 1974, India shocked the world by detonating a nuclear device. In the diplomatic controversy that ensued, the Canadian government expressed outrage that India had extracted plutonium from a Canadian reactor donated only for peaceful purposes. In the aftermath, relations between the two nations cooled considerably.

As Conflicting Visions: Canada and India in the Cold War World 1945-1976 reveals, Canada and India’s relationship was turbulent long before the first bomb blast. From the time of India’s independence from Britain, Ottawa sought to build bridges between India and the West through dialogue and foreign aid. New Delhi, however, had a different vision for its future, and throughout the Cold War mistrust between the two nations deepened. These conflicting visions soured the relationship between the two governments long before India’s display of nuclear might.

Please join the Bill Graham Centre, the Asian Institute, and the Centre for South Asian Studies launch this book with a panel discussion on Canada and India from Nehru to Modi. There will be an opportunity to purchase the book and have it signed. Reception to follow 6:00-7:00 pm.

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THE IDEA OF LAY JAINISM came into being gradually as the mendicants developed strat¬egies aimed to garner lay support and to create a place for non-monastic members of the community. This lecture will look at one of the earliest stages in this process. It will focus on a description of the samaṇovāsaga (literally meaning “follower of the samaṇas”) occurring in many of the Aṅgas and Uvāṅgas of the Śvetāmbara canon. The passage describes the ideal Jain householder as envisioned by the mendicant community over the period of time when many of the early texts were composed and compiled. Through analysis of the variations in the various versions and through comparison with other early passages relating to the lay community it is possible to trace something of the evolution of the passage and to establish that it dates from a period before the development of what became the systematized account of lay Jain religiosity.

ANDREW MORE obtained his PhD from Yale University in December of 2014. His dissertation is entitled Early Statements Relating to the Lay Community in the Śvetāmbara Jain Canon.

For questions please contact alexander.oneill@mail.utoronto.ca

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YouTube Livecast at 6:00 pm EST (Toronto Time) on Thursday, March 24
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPLPj-GpQcJIl4VRTEG_CnA/live

Asha Toronto is thrilled to organize a discussion session with Ramyata Limbu.

Ramyata Limbu was involved in the earthquakes reporting as a Producer for Aljazeera, and she travelled to the districts like Rasuwa, Dhading, and Sindupalchok immediately after the massive quake hit Nepal in 2015. She has more than twenty years cumulative experience as a journalist, communicator and researcher working with community, national and international organizations at various levels. She has
worked as a correspondent for various national and international publications. She co-produced and shot the award winning feature independent documentary “Daughters of Everest” which followed the first team of all women, Nepali Sherpa climbers to ascend Everest. Ramyata co-produced the award-winning feature documentary “The Sari Soldiers” about the conflict in Nepal told through the stories of six women. She co-directed the feature documentary “Drawing the Tiger” a portrait of a rural Nepali family and their tryst with fate. Ramyata is the Director of the internationally acclaimedKathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF) . She has also worked as a political officer for the United Nations Mission in Nepal. Ramyata came to Toronto to take part in Toronto Nepali Film Festival (TNFF) 2016.

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A new generation of Chinese documentary filmmakers has been expanding the borders of the form while revealing previously unseen truths about their country.

Chinese indie cinema arrives in Toronto: fresh from our screenings in New York, San Francisco, London, and Tromsø Norway, Cinema on the Edge is pleased to announce a series of screenings in Toronto devoted to bringing the best of recent Chinese independent cinema to Canadian audiences. China Now: Independent Visions is a touring series of films based on Cinema on the Edge’s sensationally successful launch in New York City last summer. From Toronto, the series continues to Montreal, Paris, San Diego, and other venues we will be announcing soon.

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Contemporary Asian Studies students participated in an International Course Module (ICM) to Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, Vietnam, during Reading Week 2016. Led by Professor Hy Van Luong, the trip covered the theme of urban infrastructures, and students were divided into smaller groups and conducted individual research projects in collaboration with local Vietnamese university students.

This presentation will begin with an overview of the trip, and continue with individual and group presentations of the students’ research findings, followed by a Q&A session, moderated by CAS400 instructor and PhD candidate Emily Hertzman.

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The history of early Japanese America was deeply intertwined with that of Japanese imperialism even though a spatially-organized way of scholarly research has rendered the two histories almost completely separate. Inspired by the success of Anglo Saxon colonialism in its settler societies, the first group of self-styled Japanese “frontiersmen” congregated in California and its vicinity between the mid-1880s and the 1910s, regarding their own agrarian colonization and settlement in the New World frontier to be an integral part of Japan’s “overseas development.” This paper sketches out the transpacific mobility of those resettlers, who refashioned their identity as “pioneers of overseas Japanese development” in various parts of the Asia-Pacific region from the 1890s on after race-based exclusion from white settler societies of North America.

Eiichiro Azuma is Alan Charles Kors Term Chair Associate Professor of History and Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005) and a co-editor of Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford, 2006) and the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (Oxford, 2016). He has a number of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, including the Journal of American History, Journal of Asian Studies, and Pacific Historical Review.

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Student teams will pitch their ideas to address a real world problem in Asia, competing for the ultimate prize: funding for their project. Watch live to see which Big Ideas will win!

The pitches will take place from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, followed by a celebratory reception until 1:00 pm.

JUDGES

Joseph Wong
Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation, Munk School of Global Affairs; Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of Political Science

Teresa Kramarz
Director, Munk One Program, Munk School of Global Affairs

Melinda Jacobs
Co-founder, Lucent Sky

About the Competition
The Richard Charles Lee Big Ideas Competition invites U of T students from across disciplines and degree programs in the Faculty of Arts and Science to come up with an idea for a creative, social entrepreneurial, innovative project that takes what they know about contemporary Asia to solve a problem, spread an idea, or make a difference. Through workshops, brainstorming and critiquing sessions throughout the year, students receive advice and feedback from experts and gain important hard and soft skillsets for meeting the diverse challenges of our rapidly changing world. In the process, we are building global citizens and future leaders whose work is grounded in the research rigour needed to identify critical problems and shape solutions to make a difference. Learn more at munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/bigideas

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How did self-determination get written into human rights? And by whom? In her lecture, Lydia Liu reopens the story of how the postwar norms of human rights were radically transformed by unexpected clashes with the classical standard of civilization in international law. She analyzes the drafting of the document of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the UN debates surrounding it to explore the translingual forging of universalism in the multiple temporalities of global history.

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow in 1997 and a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2004-05. Her publications include The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (2010), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004), and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995). Recently, she published a co-edited volume called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (2013) with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko.

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An understated winner of the Silver Lion from the 2015 Venice Biennale, the film “Factory Complex” by Seoul-based artist and director Heung-Soon IM gives voice to the endured oppressions faced by female factory workers in South Korea during the 1960s. When the workers organized, they met brutal state-sanctioned retaliation. Subtlety invoking socio-economic issues, such as expectations within a highly hierarchical and patriarchal society, this unconventional documentary leads us through the workers’ degradation and persistence with a measured poise.

For this three-part event, artist and filmmaker Heung-Soon Im will deliver a lecture about the art of documentary filmmaking across cinematic and exhibition spaces. This lecture will then be followed by a reception held at the same location, which precedes a screening of Heung-Soon Im’s Factory Complex at the Royal Cinema later in the evening.

Heung-Soon IM was born in Seoul, 1969. As a painter and director, he delivers various issues of people who, including family from a working class, manage their lives under the circumstances given from the society, nation, and capital in a lyrical and sometimes political way. His artworks have been exhibited in Gwangju Biennale(in 2002, 2004, 2010). His first documentary Jeju Prayer(2012) was invited to Jeonju International Film Festival in 2012 and his latest work Factory Complex Venice Biennale recently.

3 PM – 5 PM Lecture, reception follows

This will be a bilingual event featuring consecutive interpretation from Korean into English by Professor Ju Hui Judy Han.

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The talk focuses on China’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign, initiated by President Xi Jinping. It presents background information on China’s existing corruption problems, and their causes and implications on the state governance system. In contrast to the popular view that regards such measures as part of a conspiratorial power struggle, the talk suggests that they address structural problems deeply rooted in the Chinese polity.

Professor Xuehua SHI is Deputy Dean of School of Government at Beijing Normal University, Director of the Centre for Political Development and Government Innovation, and Director of the Centre for Political Party. He has published 6 monographs, 5 edited volumes, and nearly 300 journal articles. His main research fields include political and administrative reform, public policy and management, comparative study of political parties, comparative development models, and international strategy and policy.