Description

Anita McGahan is Associate Dean (Research), Director of the PhD Program and Professor of Strategic Management at Rotman (with a cross-appointment to the Munk School of Global Affairs). Her research is focused on industry change, sustainable competitive advantage and the establishment of new fields. An area of particular interest to her is in global health and the diffusion of knowledge across international boundaries.

Description

Something interesting has been happening in the iconic zones of American World War II memory. They are filling up with more densely interpreted histories of the war in the form of films, media productions, museum exhibits, historic markers, memorials, tour packages, and so on. This expansion of institutionalized representations of World War II is happening at the very moment in which the generation that experienced the war is passing on. This talk will offer some preliminary reflections on the historical and political forces that converge in this transitional moment. Drawing on ethnographic work in memorial museums, commemorative events, and tourism practices in both Pearl Harbor and Normandy, the talk will ask about the role of memorialization of the ‘good war’ in the ecologies of affect that undergird American national imagination in the era of post-9/11 and post-witness memory making.

Geoffrey White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. His research in Solomon Islands and Hawai‘I on the politics of Pacific War memory [The Pacific Theater: Island Representations of World War II (co-edited, University of Hawai‘I Press 1989) and Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War (co-authored, Smithsonian 1990); Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-edited, Duke 2001)] now extends to American war tourism in France.

Description

UTMUN aims to train and prepare both experienced and novice delegates for larger simulations on a university scale.

Taking place in February of each year, the three-day Conference provides students with unique and exciting educational opportunities as they draft resolutions, engage in heated debates and master the art of diplomacy and negotiation.

UTMUN committees integrate dynamic and real-world crises that carry far-reaching international implications. Each crisis update builds on preceding events, compounding conflicts and challenging delegates to adapt to escalating security threats and startling paradigm shifts.
UTMUN is staffed exclusively by the students of the University of Toronto, Canada’s most prestigious post-secondary institution, located at the heart of Toronto. Our friendly and knowledgeable staff will be there to ensure a smooth and enjoyable weekend.

Description

This event is open to UofT students and faculty only.

As a recently published Maclean’s article on the influx of Asian students in Canadian universities highlights, racial tensions are still prevalent on campus, despite the image of Asian-Americans changing from perpetual foreigner to model minority. Join the Pan-Asia Student Society for the screening of Who Killed Vincent Chin?, a 1987 documentary film on the racially-motivated murder of Vincent Chin, an incident that is cited as the catalyst for political activity amongst Asian-Americans. His murder sparked the creation of the Asian-American consciousness, uniting disparate racial and cultural identities with the common experience of discrimination. After the screening, Professors Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama, and Roland Coloma will chair a roundtable discussion on the movie, the incident itself, and its lasting influence on today’s perception of what it means to be Asian in North America.

Refreshments will be provided. The screening will begin promptly at 1:10 PM in 108N in the North House of the Munk School of Global Affairs, with the subsequent roundtable discussion starting around 3:00 PM. Refreshments will be provided.

Event RSVP is requested since there will be limited room space for this event. Please email rsvp@passuoft.com to reserve your spot!

Description

Hong Kong has been one of the fastest growing East Asian economies since the end of the Second World War. The adoption and practice of economic freedom have been major pillars in its economic success. The experience of Hong Kong has served as a reference for other emerging economies in the region. This seminar will review the global context and ingredients of economic freedom that have brought success and prosperity to Hong Kong. It will ask “what if” questions and elaborate the Hong Kong Challenges to Economic Freedom.

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP by February 4, 2013.

Description

The post-Liberation days of South Korea, or the early days of post-colonial South Korea (August 1945 to July 1948), witnessed the rise of various competing and conflicting projects. For instance, the nationalist agenda of building a nation-state competed with the agendas that the proponents of ‘overcoming modernism’ and/or ‘pan-Asianism’ formulated. Also, universalistic projects of civilization and democratization contradicted the particularistic race- and region-oriented projects of nationalists and pan-Asianists, and vice versa. These conflicting projects contested for hegemony on the one hand and compromised with each other on the other. This suggests that few, if any, ideas and projects during this time either secured the hegemony or constructed a stereotyped imagination in the contemporary discursive space, to the extent that the post-Liberation days could be termed as ‘an amorphous space and time.’

Chong Myong Im earned his Ph.D degree in Korean history at the University of Chicago. He teaches Korean modern history at Chonnam National University, South Korea. As a Fulbright visiting scholar at UCLA, he is currently writing a book manuscript, titled The State Dialectics of the Republic of Korea for a Modern Nation-State.

Description

SIRG is hosting a half-day symposium on Wednesday, February 27th.

This is an invite-only event aimed at practitioners, academics and industry veterans. Our goal is to invite leaders in the Taiwanese social enterprise sector to discuss the challenges they face and to collaborate in finding solutions to move the ecosystem forward. We’re also honored to have Professor Joseph Wong — coming all the way from Toronto — to give the keynote.

Our vision is to have participants leave with a clear idea of the challenges the social innovation ecosystem faces and actionable steps in mind to solve the challenges.

Description

During the last two decades the position of food history has shifted from the periphery to the centre of the academic interests. It has become a respectable source of knowledge about how and why societies have changed over time. In this lecture, Katarzyna Cwiertka will look back at her own contribution to the study of culinary culture of modern Japan and Korea, drawing on her two monographs – Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (Reaktion Books 2006) and Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea (Reaktion Books 2012). She will also briefly introduce the material from her forthcoming volume Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century East Asia (Ashgate 2013). While illuminating the importance of studying food in its own right, as a domain of culture, the lecture will focus on the wide-ranging possibilities that research on food offers as a window into historical inquiry that extends beyond the realm of cuisine and nutrition.

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka is Professor and Chair of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. In her scholarship to date, she has utilized food as a vehicle to talk about social change in modern East Asia, and explored global interconnectivity expressed through food and facilitated by colonialism, war and cultural imperialism.

Description

The Night Letters (Surat-Surat Malam) by the artist Nashar (1928-1994) inspire a revisionist intellectual and cultural history of Indonesia between 1968 and 1977. This is a period that followed the state-sponsored mass murder of as many as one million communist party members and the imprisonment of many more, including leading artists and intellectuals. Scholars have seen these years as counter-revolutionary and lacking romance, the prelude to thirty years of repressive right-wing military dictatorship under Soeharto and a time of collaborationist intellectuals and apolitical artists. But this was not (entirely) the case. The early years of the Soeharto era were an ambiguous time when it was in no way clear what direction state and society would take. There was hope for a moralistic “New Order” in Indonesia, excitement at the reengagement with the West after a period of isolationist politics, and suppressed horror at the killings and arrests. Through the Night Letters Nashar engaged publicly, if obliquely, with the horror of 1965 and 1966. He figures and critiques the manipulations and reconstructions of history that would become a hallmark of the Soeharto state. Nashar represents the possibility of a new intellectual and cultural history of the early Soeharto years.

Jeffrey Hadler first lived with a Minangkabau family as a high school exchange student in 1985. He studied comparative literature and Southeast Asia as an undergraduate at Yale and then Southeast Asian History as a graduate student at Cornell. He taught at the State Islamic University in Jakarta in 2000 before joining the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, where he is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies. His book Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism won the 2011 Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

Description

Students of South Korean multiculturalism have laudably given voice to the many non-Koreans who live in a proudly single-blood nation and have extensively criticized the state for its self-interested multicultural project. Without critiquing these claims, I argue in this critical review essay that the multicultural scholarship has omitted at least one important group who diversifies South Korea: the part-Black children of military couplings. This dearth of works on Korean-Black children in particular is unexpected in light of Superbowl XL MVP Hines Ward’s 2006 visit being widely seen as the opening salvo on a multicultural South Korea. Yet, because scholars are guided by the lens of the state on who the “multicultural citizens” are and because we typically opt for the conceptual language of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism over that of race and (ethno)racism, Black-descent populations tend to be overlooked. By doing so, I argue, we as scholars inadvertently reify the country’s belief that Blacks are the most biologically and culturally different from them as well as the country’s opposite perception of diasporic Koreans, of Asians from the Pacific region, and of lighter-skinned people. We also enable the state and like-minded adherents to promote policies of cultural assimilation of minorities that, in reality, deny pluralistic equality on the related basis of biological (racial) criteria. The essay briefly concludes with the consequences of inadvertently reifying state hegemonic projects.

Nadia Y. Kim is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. She received a doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2003 and was a faculty member at Brandeis University (Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies) from 2004-07. Her research interests are ‘race’/ethnicity, nation, citizenship, immigration, transnationalism/diaspora, gender and intersectionality, community politics, Environmental Justice, Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies. Her book, Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to L.A. (2008, Stanford University Press) won two awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2009: the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities and the Book of the Year Award from the Section on Asia and Asian America. Her current project examines the gendered processes in fights for clean air among low-income immigrant women of color, namely Latino and Asian American (many of whom are undocumented). She has published in numerous scholarly journals such as Social Problems, Critical Sociology, the Du Bois Review, and Amerasia Journal, won two ASA Early Career Awards and research paper awards, has been an ASA Minority Fellow, and a selected Social Science Research Council Summer Institute participant.

Description

For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spin and weave at home. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful and outdated, because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state, and because rural people were in theory supplied with cloth through the rationing system. In this talk, I look at the reasons for the survival of handloom weaving, including interlocking scarcities of grain, cash, cloth, and cotton that forced rural women to make cloth from whatever little cotton they could scrape together, as well as the many ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and socially prescribed gift exchanges. My focus on cloth and textile work allows me, I hope, to describe how socialism changed the daily lives of rural women.

Jacob Eyferth is a social historian of twentieth-century China interested in the lives of non-elite people. His first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots, is an ethnographic history of a community of papermakers in Sichuan. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Cotton, Gender, and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China.

Description

The Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts and the Network for Sensory Research are pleased to present
THINKING ABOUT DINNER: A Workshop on Cuisine

Cuisine used to be the perfection of what you ate at home. It still is, to a great extent. But now technology and art transcend the “tasty”. New cuisines increasingly reflect a creative urge that has no roots in home eating. This workshop examines new and surprising trends in cooking outside the home.

Friday, March 1, 2013
3:30-4:45 Charles Spence (Oxford) “Visual Display of Food: Historical Reflections”
5:00-6:15 Ophelia Deroy (London) “Food as Art”
6:30-7:30 Chef Charles Michel (Bogota)

Saturday, March 2, 2013
10:30-11:45 Katarzyna Cwiertka (Leiden) “Kaiseki and Japanese Cuisine”
12:30-1:15 Chef Dan Felder (Momofuku New York)
2:30-3:45 Peter Ludlow (Northwestern) “Molecular Gastronomy as Hacktivism”
4:00-5:30 Round Table Discussion: Steven Shapin (Harvard), Barry Smith (London), Mohan Matthen (Toronto)

Traditionally, food choices were seen simply as a matter of sensory pleasure. Consequently, the focus for consumers and producers was exclusively on the quality of the food and wine consumed. However, there is increasing awareness of the importance, first, of the overall experience in which a meal is consumed, and, second, of culinary culture

Recent research in the sensory and food sciences has shown just how multi- sensory the experience of eating and drinking are, and how extrinsic circumstances not only contribute to overall enjoyment, but even influence the perception of flavour. In an important development, chefs now work with scientists (including cognitive and behavioural scientists) in a quest to discover what makes for the perfect meal. They have also begun to experiment with new configurations of the ancient components of appreciating meals. They are deconstructing and reconstructing traditional cooking.

Until about 1965, restaurants shared the same aesthetic goals as home cooks, though of course with professional levels of execution. Culinary technique was perfected in restaurants, but culinary aesthetics emerged from homes. In the last fifty years, however, a new culinary aesthetic has developed, an aesthetic that originates in restaurants, not homes. The apex of the new aesthetic is to be found in such restaurants as El Bulli, Fat Duck, and Noma. Importantly, each of these restaurants has research and technical development projects of their own.

Some results: the use of vacuum and low cooking temperatures, flash freezing with liquid nitrogen, ultra-high temperature searing, and other such “molecular” techniques; the development of new food sources and new ways of using foods, including notably moss, fungus, seaweed and kelp.

These R&D projects are housed in dedicated research facilities. While some of these resultant techniques will undoubtedly enter home cuisine (and already have), and be adapted to the social aesthetic of eating at home, it is important to recognize that they represent a new way of appreciating food. They are arguably the basis of a new cuisine, perhaps even more distinct than classical French cuisine and Japanese kaiseki are from the corresponding home cuisines.

This event is free and open to the pubic. Due to space limitations, we request that you register if you plan to come.
REGISTER: http://thinkingaboutdinner.eventbrite.ca
INFORMATION: http://www.humanities.utoronto.ca/event_details/id=932

If you have an accessibility need, please contact Kim Yates at (416) 946-0313 or jhi.associate@utoronto.ca to arrange an appropriate accommodation.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

CANADA PREMIERE | Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale | Dir: Wei Te-Sheng| Taiwan (2011) | 276:00 | English subtitles

Released in 2011, Wei Te-Sheng’s “Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale” marks a pivotal moment in Taiwanese Cinema. A historical epic drama that follows the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (Wushe Incident) and the subsequent uprisings by the indigenous Seediq people, “Warriors of the Rainbow” re-imagines the traumatic history of Taiwan through spectacular violence and melodrama. Ambitious in scale and vision, the film is Taiwan’s most expensive production, drawing together 400 technicians and over 1500 hired actors across Asia to realize its epic action set pieces.

Description

The Ontario Japanese Speech Contest gives a chance to students learning Japanese at universities and language schools to present their speeches in four categories: Beginners’, Intermediate, Advanced and Open.

Special presentation:
Kimono Fashion Show by Toronto Kimono Club
Fuuga Kimono Taiko Performance by Arashido Taiko

Admission is free.

For more information, please click here: http://buna.yorku.ca/ojsc/

Organized by Organizing Committee for the Ontario Japanese Speech Contest

Description

Dilip Soman is Corus Chair in Communication Strategy, Professor of Marketing, and Senior Fellow, Desautels Center for Integrative Th inking, at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. His research interests include the psychology of judgment and decision-making and its applications to consumer and managerial behaviour, the creation and measurement of customer value through service excellence and life-cycle management, managerial behaviour and decision-making, strategic marketing, behavioural pricing and promotions, service delivery, innovation and creativity management, and customer management. Professor Soman serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Marketing Research, as well as serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology and Marketing Letters. He was recently named as one of the professors to watch for by the Financial Times. He received a BE from the University of Bombay, an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management, and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Description

The Undergraduate student research fair is a chance for undergraduate students who have done research abroad to show their findings to their colleagues and professors in the University of Toronto academic community. At this year’s student research fair, students Aaron Wilson, Sharath Voleti, Steve Zhehang Deng, and Hyojin Jung presented their findings from their recent research trip to Taipei, Taiwan, and Xiamen, China that explored the political, economic, and cultural relationship between these two dynamic cities.

As part of the University of Toronto’s JPA411 course (titled, Global Taiwan, and taught by Professor Joseph Wong of the Asian Institute) wanted to see how relations in the cross strait were developing, and examine how a former war zone has been transformed into one of the most politically, economically, and culturally dynamic areas in East Asia. Led by Professor Lynette Ong of the University of Toronto’s Asian Institute led the student delegation on an experimental learning experience that forced students to contrast the different experiences of two similar, but very different regions. Students of the Taiwan-China International Course Module were able to witness how the dynamic interaction between politics, trade, tourism, language, culture, and entertainment affected change in the cross-strait relations, and were able to study potential future trajectories in cross-strait relations.

The students took part in a 7 day trip during the reading-week break with financial assistance by the University of Toronto’s faculty of Arts and Science, and scheduling assistance from the Taiwan Economic and Culture Office (TECO) in Toronto. Professor Lynette Ong, the students who took place in the Taiwan-China course module, and the Asian Institute would like to warmly thank the help of TECO-Toronto for making their research trip such a success.

Description

After the Opium Wars, several treaties were signed between the Qing government and Western powers, stating that missionaries could spread Christianity in China freely, and more importantly could purchase properties in China. Through these treaties, missionaries gained official tolerance and even protection. In reality, however, the treaties alone could not guarantee a smooth life for many missionaries. Focusing on Paris Foreign Missions in Guangzhou, this talk examines the contest between Catholic missionaries and the late Qing government over property ownership.

Hongyan Xiang obtained BA from Wuhan University of China, MA from National University of Singapore, and currently, she is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Department of History of Pennsylvania State University, under the tutelage of Professor Ronnie Hsia. Her dissertation focuses on Paris Foreign Missions (Missions Étrangères de Paris, short M.E.P.) in Guangzhou from 1860 to 1927, particularly on the economic and financial history. Her research interests include Chinese history from the late imperial time to early twentieth century, Christianity and indigenous beliefs in China, and Sino-Western interchanges in the late imperial times.

Description

In 1970, just as the second decade of Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian rule was about to begin, an aging American poet made a difficult trip to Korea. Muriel Rukeyser, then the head of the American Center for International P.E.N., hoped to meet Kim Chi-Ha, a dissident poet awaiting the death sentence in prison. Four years earlier, a prominent intellectual of Japan’s New Left named Tsurumi Shunsuke had made the same trip to meet the Korean poet, who was then under house arrest in a sanatorium. These attempts at humanitarian intervention ran aground, however, and resulted in two out-of-joint dialogues that reveal much about the politics of global dissidence in the Cold War era. The talk examines these dialogues, preserved in Rukeyser’s poems and Tsurumi’s interview, as occasions for thinking about the role of literature in Yushin Korea and conditions of possibility for intellectual solidarity in East Asia under “Pax Americana.”

Youngju Ryu is Assistant Professor of Korean Literature at the University of Michigan and the author of forthcoming Writers of the Winter Republic: South Korean Literature and the Ethics of Resistance.

Description

What is INDePth?
INDePth – Interrogating Notions of Development and Progress – is an annual student-run conference at the University of Toronto. The three-day conference comprises of panels, workshops, unconference sessions, a gala dinner and a Great Debate to not only facilitate intellectually stimulating conversations but also connect undergraduate and graduate students from across the globe. Focusing on China as a case study, INDePth 2013 proudly presents prominent speakers including David Mulroney (Former Canadian Ambassador to China), Joseph Fewsmith (Director of the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia), Andrea Chun (Lawyer, radio show host at CBC and Fairchild). The conference is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Asian Institute, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and many other organizations and has built networks with McGill University, University of British Columbia, York University etc.

What does Your Ticket Include?
The one time registration fee grants you admission to our three-day conference at Great Hall, Hart House at the University of Toronto from March 8-10, 2013. You will be provided a nametag, a conference program, lunch and coffee break snacks each day at the conference. The fee also includes your ticket to the gourmet buffet style, semiformal Gala Dinner (catered by Hart House, worth 45 dollars) on the evening of March 9.

Registration Dates & Methods:
Early Bird: $35.00 CAD (until January 31, 2013)
Regular: $65.00 CAD (until March 1, 2013)
Online registration at http://indepthconference.com/registration/

For Group Registration (any group more than 10 students), we offer special discount. Please skip this process and directly contact internal@indepthconference.com before February 20 to acquire group discount.

For more information on INDePth, visit www.indepthconference.com
Like INDePth on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/indepthconference.
Follow INDePth on Twitter: @INDePthCon

Description

The large-scale influx of Korean Chinese (or Chosǒnjok) migrants from northeastern China into South Korea in the last decades of the twentieth century conjures up images of formerly impassable Cold War borders suddenly rendered passable. Yet opportunities for legally crossing the border into South Korea at this historical juncture were highly circumscribed. Chosǒnjok who desired entry to South Korea responded by becoming experts in manipulating the kinship categories sanctioned by South Korea’s restrictive immigration laws. Faking kinship ironically turned out to be a more expedient means of entering South Korean than relying on real genealogies and the assistance of actual blood relatives. I explore how these tactics of faking kinship point to the tensions between kin-based versus document-based forms ethnic identification in South Korea, and more generally to the difficulties of defining what counts as kinship or ethnicity under contemporary conditions of transnational migration.

Caren Freeman has been teaching in the Anthropology Department as well as coordinating the Summer Language Institute at the University of Virginia since 2007. Freeman’s talk is based on her recent book, Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea (Cornell 2011). The book explores how the large-scale migration of ethnic Korean brides and workers from China into South Korea unsettles the way kinship, gender, and ethnonational relations are imagined and practiced on both sides of the migration steam.

Description

In many grievances in rural China, law, legal consciousness, and legal institutions appear absent, distant, or inaccessible. At the same time, the Chinese state has undertaken a major initiative to promote constitutionalism and “rule-of-law,” and a growing body of research portrays Chinese citizens as increasingly conscious of and knowledgeable about law. Where does legal consciousness come from, how do citizens in authoritarian regimes develop legal consciousness, and how does legal consciousness affect legal mobilization? This paper presents findings from a field experiment conducted in conjunction with a pre-test/post-test representative panel survey and in-depth interviews in rural China to establish the role of media messages and social interactions in the shaping of legal consciousness and to document the impact of legal consciousness on legal mobilization. The research has implications for the way in which publics in authoritarian regimes like China come to understand—and experience—the “rule of law”: increased legal consciousness and legal mobilization may further legitimate party-state institutions, which dominate dispute-resolution mechanisms and legal-aid provision at the rural grassroots.

Susan Whiting (Ph.D, Michigan; B.A. Yale) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Law and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Power and Wealth in Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and, most recently, “Fiscal Pressures, Land Disputes, and Justice Claims in Rural and Peri-Urban China” (Urban Studies, 2011).

Description

The 6th October 1976 massacre in Bangkok has been one of the most traumatic events in modern Thai history. It is not forgotten, yet to these days, the account of the tragedy is vague, evasive and limited. It is the “unforgetting.” For some, Buddhism contributes to this unforgetting silence. To deal with the painful memory, some survivors of the massacre draw strength and understanding from Buddhism which provides mental (intellectual and spiritual) resources. The Buddhist approach is quite different from the conventional (Western? Non-Buddhist) ones in regard to healing or “coming to terms” with the past in order to move forward. What does it mean to “come to terms” in the Thai Buddhist environment? How does this Buddhist view address the issues of justice, punishment, impunity, accountability, and historical truth? Are the tensions between the legal/secular approach to traumatic past and the Buddhist one? Has the former been compromised? What is the significance of “forgiveness” in the Buddhist view and how does it work? Does Buddhism encourage forgetting? Or does it offer its notion of remembering? What could be the effects of the Buddhist approach on social memories and historical understanding of the event in the longer term? The study is a cultural and intellectual history, not a philosophical or psychological one. It is not interested in the doctrinal explanation or its disapproval. It wants to examine the ways those people dealt with the traumatic past in particular cultural and historical contexts.

Thongchai Winichakul is Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests are in cultural and intellectual history of Siam including nationalism, modern geography and cartography, and historical knowledge. He currently works on the intellectual foundation of modern Siam (1880s-1930s) and also a book on the memories of the 1976 massacre in Bangkok. He also publishes articles and books in Thai, including many political and social commentaries. He is elected the President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013/14.

Description

In the 1990s China embarked on a series of political reforms intended to increase, however modestly, political participation and reduce the abuse of power by local officials. Although there was initial progress, these reforms have largely stalled and, in many cases, gone backward. If there were sufficient incentives to inaugurate reform, why wasn’t there enough momentum to continue and deepen them? The short answer is that the sort of reforms necessary to make local officials more responsible to the citizens they govern cut too deeply into the organizational structure of the party.

Joseph Fewsmith is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Boston University. He is the author or editor of seven books, including, most recently (January 2013), The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (Cambridge University Press). Other works include China since Tiananmen (2nd edition, 2008) and China Today, China Tomorrow (2010). Other books include Elite Politics in Contemporary China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), The Dilemmas of Reform in China: Political Conflict and Economic Debate (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), and Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890-1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985). He is one of the seven regular contributors to the China Leadership Monitor, a quarterly web publication analyzing current developments in China. He travels to China regularly and is active in the Association for Asian Studies and the American Political Science Association. He is an associate of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University and the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future at Boston University.

Description

Speakers from a variety of disciplines will discuss their careers, and give advice on professional development and how to achieve your own success! There will also be the opportunity to ask questions of each speaker during the Q&A period after the panel, so come out and interact with our distinguished guests.

DISTINGUISHED GUESTS:

Ben Hum is currently the Founder/President of Visionis Corporation, Co-founder/COO of InsightArk Inc. and Co-founder/President of NAAAP Toronto (North American Association of Asian Professionals). Ben is also a member of the Chinese Advisory Cabinet at SickKids Foundation and AFP Foundation for Philanthropy (Canada). His prior experiences include being Co-founder/COO of Global Connexxions and was awarded the 1998 Chinese Canadian Entrepreneurship Best Business Start-up Award.

John J.S. Park received his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree from McGill University and studied law in England and Canada, earning a J.D. from Queen’s University. Prior to establishing PARK’S, he began his career as a civil litigation lawyer with a leading law firm in the GTA and as a criminal lawyer at one of the most successful chambers of trial lawyers. Mr. Park is bilingual and speaks fluent Korean, and is a regular contributor as a columnist to Korean newspapers. He is also the current president of the Korean Canadian Lawyers Association.

Ellen Mak-Tam is currently the Laboratory Manager at the North York General Hospital, Genetics Program. She is a member of the College of Medical Technologists of Ontario (CMLTO) and the Canadian Society of Medical Laboratory Science (CSMLS). She is also a Clinical Coordinator for the Michener Institute and an Ontario Laboratory Accreditation (OLA) assessor for the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC), Quality Management Program, Laboratory Services (QMP-LS). In addition to managing clinical laboratory operations, human and financial resources, Ellen also coordinates research initiatives, oversees training for Michener Genetics Technology students, organizes conferences, seminars, publishes and participates on committees.

Dr. Frank Nhan graduated Clinic Honours from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College where he received his designation as a Doctor of Chiropractic. He also holds an Honours Bachelor of Science Degree in Developmental Biology and Zoology from the University of Toronto. He is certified in Bio-Medical Acupuncture with a Traditional Chinese Medicine foundation. He is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, and a Registered Trigenics Practitioner.

Refreshments will be served during the Q&A Session. Feel free to bring friends– we hope to see you all there!

Description

Religious traditions throughout the world are often concerned with crafting a best point of entry to their truths and practices, in part by way of succinct distillations that highlight and make available what is most important in their normative texts and teachings. After noting a wider array of Sanskritic Brahminical Hindu practices of distillation at the service of introduction, this paper focuses on the efforts of Srivaisnava acaryas to distill and encapsulate the truth of the 9th century Tamil language mystical poetry known as Tiruvaymoli in ever more succinct formulations.

Francis X. Clooney, SJ is the Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. His most recent books are Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Boarders (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

Description

This presentation considers the intersection of tourism and war at the 1940 Chosŏn Grand Exposition, which was held in Seoul at the height of Asia-Pacific War. Its opening event was replete with spectacular military images, from warships and tanks to various tributes to the war dead; among other things, the Holy War Pavilion and a tower for military services were exclusively devoted to militarism and the war. However, this talk seeks to extend the reading of this exhibition from a site of wartime propaganda more toward one of wartime battlefield tourism. Located at East Kyŏng Sŏng Station, which connected Korea with Japan and its other colonies, and by exhibiting virtual tours of other regions, the 1940 Exposition can be duly regarded as a part of wartime tourism. This presentation, specifically by juxtaposing the 1940 Exposition with group travel activities, including school excursions (shūgaku ryokō in Japanese; suhak yŏhaeng in Korean), suggests the possibility of reading this exposition as a site of mass mobilization at the level of individuals and of multitudes of people. By virtually touring battlefields, this paper will examine how tourists might have projected their own feelings onto tourist sites and thus have become unconsciously engaged with a larger political agenda. In doing so, these tours played roles both in mobilizing the youth for the war and in creating a larger imperial community for which all the colonies would fight.

Inhye Kang is currently a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from McGill University’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies. She is currently transforming her thesis to focus on the intersection of tourism and exhibitions in Japan and Korea from the prewar to the postwar period.

Description

Through an ethnographic study of agricultural producers, traders, and policymakers in West Bengal, this article examines the role of law in market transformation and, more specifically, the kinds of legal and regulatory shifts that occur when food markets are rescaled from local or regional to national or transnational regimes. It compares wholesale markets for fresh fruits and vegetables with the food supply chains created by rapidly globalizing corporate supermarkets, and it suggests that existing market transactions in West Bengal more closely approximate competitive exchange than the standardized, centralized, large-scale contractual transactions required to support a supermarket. The article thus argues that what we are presently witnessing in India is not, as policy analysts describe it, a shift from state-regulated to privately-governed food supply chains, but rather an effort to reallocate power in a marketplace mediated by new legal and extralegal rules.

Amy J. Cohen is an associate professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Her scholarship examines dispute resolution and economic and social development, often from a transnational perspective. Professor Cohen has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Turin, Faculty of Law, the Kathmandu School of Law, and a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. At Ohio State, she is affiliated faculty at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the Food Innovation Center. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School where she was a Hewlett Fellow in the Program on Negotiation.

Description

H.E. Lu Shumin was Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Canada from 2005 to 2008 and became Executive Vice President of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPFIA) in August 2011. Immediately prior to his appointment at CPFIA he was the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Commissioner in the Macao Special Administrative Region. Amb. Lu has extensive experience in North America, having served in the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. in the 1990s and in the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa in the late 1970s.

Description

Chenggang Xu joined the University of Hong Kong in 2009. He obtained his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1991 under the supervision of Janos Kornai and Eric Maskin (2007 Nobel Laureate). He taught at London School of Economics for 17 years; and at Tsinghua University as Special-Term Professor for 6 years. He had visiting positions at HKUST, Harvard and IMF. His research interests are contract theory, corporate finance/governance, law and finance, financial regulation, development, institutions, and Chinese economy. He is a Research Fellow at the CEPR (Europe); was a faculty fellow of Harvard Institute for International Development and Center for International Development of Harvard. He has served as co-editor and member of editorial boards for more than a dozen major international and Chinese journals in economics and finance. He has publications in major journals, such as Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, European Economic Review, American Law and Economic Review, Economics Letters, Journal of Comparative Economics, Economics of Transition, etc.; chapters in more than a dozen books, and has published a book. He had provided policy advice on Chinese reforms to the Chinese State Council, Peoples Bank of China, the CASS, the World Bank, the IMF, the UNDP, the EBRD, and the UK HM Treasury. He has also served as consultants for the World Bank and the IMF.

Description

The Because I am a Girl Urban Programme seeks to build safe, accountable, and inclusive cities with and for adolescent girls. In 2012, a study was conducted to understand how safe and inclusive cities are for adolscent girls, and this talk will examine the findings from Hanoi and Delhi.

Alana Livesey holds an MSc in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her dissertation examined the sex ratio imbalance in China and the role of the state in perpetuating son preference, under the supervision of Dr. Naila Kabeer. She has over 7 years of experience working at various organisations, including Plan International, UN Women China, and UNICEF Canada.

Description

It’s 2013. Visible minorities are 50% of the GTA population. What impact has this had in the coverage of stories that fall outside what is considered “the mainstream?” Are the shootings at the Sikh gurdwara in the U.S., Tamil protests in Toronto or the Shafia murders treated like any other story or treated as stories about a specific community? Who does the reporting and does ethnic background make a difference in reporting style?

Stewart Bell is an award-winning Canadian journalist and the author of three non-fiction books, Bayou of Pigs, The Martyr’s Oath and Cold Terror, a national bestseller. He has reported from Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Europe and the Balkans. In 2009, Stewart won a South Asian Journalists Association Award for his writing about the civil war in Sri Lanka. His magazine article about child soldiers in West Africa, “Guerrilla Girls,” was awarded the Amnesty International prize. Stewart’s writing about terrorism issues for the National Post, where he is a Senior Reporter, was awarded a Citation of Merit from the National Newspaper Awards. He contributes occasionally to the Global National newscast and co-wrote the Global Television documentary “Know Your Enemy,” which won the RTNDA award for Investigative Journalism. He holds a Master of Journalism from Carleton University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.

Nicholas Davis is the Manager of Program Development for CBC Radio. He is an accomplished journalist and writer who has worked in radio, television and print and has done so for the past 26 years covering everything from current affairs to the arts. He has worked as CBC for the last 15 years and was the former Senior Producer of Metro Morning on CBC Radio One and oversaw the transformation of the show to reflect Toronto’s diversity. He has won many awards for his journalism, including a 2006 Gabriel for a story on Holly Jones. Nick was a regular guest on TSN’s Off The Record and SUN TV’s Grill Room. He has taught radio skills to new journalists across the country for CBC Radio and also lectured on journalism at Ryerson University, Seneca College, Sheridan College and Centennial College.

Noor Javed is an award winning reporter with the Toronto Star, and is currently a feature writer at the paper. She fulfilled a life-long dream when she joined the Star in 2007, and since then has been working to tell the stories reflective of the city’s diverse communities. In 2011, Noor won a National Newspaper Award for her analysis and reporting on Toronto’s booming condo market. She was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalism investigative reporting award for her series on polygamy. Noor holds a M.A. in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario and a Human Biology degree from the University of Toronto.

Rita Trichur is a telecom reporter in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business and writes about a variety of topics ranging from manufacturing to maple syrup. She joined the Globe in late 2010 after spending three-and-a-half years as a financial services and economics reporter at the Toronto Star. Prior to that, she did a six-year stint as a reporter-editor at The Canadian Press and spent three years in a variety of positions at the Ottawa Sun. Rita has a Bachelor of Journalism and Political Science and a Masters of Arts in Canadian Studies – both from Carleton University. Her love of journalism, however, began at age six when she earned $10 for writing a short story for the Star.

Description

TICKETS: Tickets can be purchased through the UofTtix box office at the following link http://www.uofttix.ca/view.php?id=981

Early bird pricing: $5 for students, $10 for general public (in effect until Friday, March 8th at 11:59PM)

From March 8th – March 21st: $5 for students, $15 for general public

Any unsold tickets can be purchased at the door (cash only)

Hosted in Toronto, Canada on March 21st and 22nd 2013, at the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility housed in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, A World in Flux: The Movement of Conflict in the 21st Century will explore the movement of conflict through people, technology, and media. It will seek to address such questions as: In what ways do conflicts transcend borders? How is the mobility of conflict currently being addressed and managed, and by whom?

From the local to the global, the movement of conflict across borders has become an issue of increased political salience, while also gaining the attention of civil society at large. Technological advancement, particularly the rise of communication tools such as social media, accelerates the mobility of ideas and, perhaps, the movement of conflict across borders. The capacity of people and ideas to transcend borders in this way elicits disaggregated responses from state authorities, native citizens, and newcomers.

At the moment, there seems to be little convergence on how to address these phenomena. This conference hopes to shed some light on potential approaches in this regard. Therefore, our discussion calls experts from different backgrounds in order to generate cross-disciplinary dialogue on how to address this issue.

Description

The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands make up a combined total of 7 square kilometres, yet are the star subject of a massive geopolitical struggle between two of the world’s most powerful nations. The battle to exert sovereign control over these uninhabited islands have all but cemented the already tense relationships between China and Japan. Join the Pan-Asia Student Society and the University of Toronto Security Affairs Forum in understanding more about this important global security issue, as well as discovering possible implications that any decision regarding the islands may have for the rest of the world.

Refreshments will be served. Don’t miss out on this greatly informative event!

Panelists:
James Manicom is a CIGI research fellow, contributing to the development of the global security program. He is also affiliated with the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Previously, he held fellowships at the ocean Policy Research Foundation in Tokyo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. James’ current research explores Arctic governance, East Asian security, and China’s role in ocean governance.

David Welch is the CIGI chair of global security and interim director at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, as well as a former professor of political science at the University of Toronto. An award-winning author and scholar, David is an expert in foreign policy decision-making and international security. He also hosts CIGI’s podcast series “Inside the Issues”.

Description

This past February, fifteen students from JPA411 (Global Taiwan) and CAS400 (Critical Perspectives on Asian Modernity) participated in an International Course Module (ICM) to both the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China to further their knowledge on cross-strait relations. The student delegation travelled to various locations including Taipei, Taichung and Kinmen in Taiwan, as well as Xiamen and Zhangzhou in Fujian, China. The student delegation approached cross-strait issues from a variety of perspectives to provide a new outlook on the complex relationship between Taiwan and China. Through a series of interviews and meetings with high officials, scholars and students on both sides of the strait, the delegates explored topics on cross-strait educational exchange, poverty, NGOs, cinema, marriage, food and migration.

The student panel will be joined by Professor Lynette Ong, leader of the delegation. The presentation will also feature keynote speaker Winston Chen, the Director General of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. Please join and relive with the students the highlights of their journey, captured by a collection of short documentaries, photographs and presentations.

THIS EVENT WILL BE PHOTOGRAPHED AND/OR VIDEOTAPED FOR ACADEMIC AND PROGRAM PROMOTION PURPOSES

YOUR PRESENCE INDICATES CONSENT TO BEING INCLUDED IN PHOTOS AND FOOTAGE AND RELEASES THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO’S ASIAN INSTITUTE AT THE MUNK SCHOOL OF GLOBAL AFFAIRS FROM ALL LIABILITY WHICH COULD ARISE FROM USE AND DISSEMINATION OF THE IMAGES AND/OR RECORDINGS IN PRINT OR ON THE WEB

Description

The disparity between rich and poor continues to increase even as developing countries experience economic growth. At the same time, inherent structural inequality that exists within the welfare state creates a problem of invisibility for seasonal, migrant, and informal sector workers. To successfully address the needs of the most vulnerable populations, we must consider the unique challenges associated with poverty and “invisibility.”

Joseph Wong is Canada Research Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs. In addition to dozens of journal articles and contributions to scholarly volumes, Professor Wong has published three books: Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State (Cornell University Press, 2011), Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics In Taiwan and South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2004), and, with Edward Friedman, Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose (Routledge, 2008). Along with Dilip Soman and Janice Stein, Wong is co-editor and contributor the forthcoming book, Innovating for the Global South: Towards a New Innovations Agenda. He has been a visiting researcher and fellow at Oxford, Harvard, and Seoul National University, among others. Wong was elected Senior Member of St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2008, named Senior Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada in 2011, and is a 2012 – 2013 recipient of the Faculty of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award. Professor Wong’s current research focuses on innovation, poverty, and health in developing world settings.

Description

It has now been over fifteen years since Hong Kong was transferred from British to Chinese control. While as much as one third of Hong Kong’s economy is now supported by links to the mainland, there are signs of a growing rift. Recent polls show that most residents of the city view themselves as Hong Kongers, not Chinese. Resistance to Beijing’s proposed national education curriculum, pro-democracy protests, anxieties over a “Chinese invasion”, and several highly publicized disputes between Hong Kongers and mainlanders have highlighted and exacerbated these tensions.

On March 28, Andrea Chun, a lawyer and host of Newsbeat, a Cantonese-language talk show, will be hosting a symposium in which students will explore these issues through discussion and debate. Guests will also be encouraged to actively participate in the conversation.

Andrea Chun is a lawyer and has also been actively involved in the Chinese media. She has been a guest host on OMNI TV and worked with the Sing Tao radio station in 1995 and 1996. In 1997 she joined Fairchild Radio, and since 1999 has been working with Fairchild TV. She received her BA and LLB from the University of Toronto.

This event is part of a series of events put on by INDePth 2013, a student organized initiative that looks development issues in China. For more information on INDePth, please visit www.indepthconference.com.

Description

In the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, we are compelled to revisit and reflect on another “post-quake” moment in modern Japan: namely, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. In that case, the Earthquake’s aftermath became nothing more than the pre-war period of the Asia-Pacific War. In this presentation Prof. Nakano proposes to intervene in our knowledge about that “post-quake” moment by especially examining the “sentiments” (shinjō) of the people (minshū) who lived during the era that advanced from earthquake to war. Many well-known songs – especially those which are the very first to come to mind as “children’s songs” in Japan — emerged in concentrated fashion during the period. How is it that people who, after the earthquake loved to sing songs that overflowed with gentleness, soon came to undertake the heavy responsibilities of the war that soon ensued?

Professor Toshio Nakano is Professor of Sociology at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He began his professional career with research on European social theorists, mainly Max Weber. His interests then shifted to the history of social thought in modern Japan, especially concerning colonialism and nationalism in the wartime and postwar periods. During the 2000s he organized an international joint research project which aimed at studying the historical and cultural characteristics of postwar time and space in Japan and East Asia from the point of view of postcolonial studies and cultural studies. The results of this project have been published in two volumes of essays in Japanese: Continuing Colonialism: Gender, Ethnicity/Nation, Race, Class (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2005), and The Occupation of Okinawa and Revival of Japan (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2006). His monographs in Japanese include: Hakushū and Popular Sentiment: Road to Total War (Tokyo: NHK Shuppankai, 2012); Ōtsuka Hisao and Maruyama Masao: Mobilization, Subject, War Responsibility (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2001); Modern Legal-System and Criticism (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1993); Max Weber and Modernity (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1983).

Description

India is at crossroads in more ways than one. Even with the present slow down, the last three decades have seen unprecedented levels of economic growth even as it is one of the world’s most vibrant democracies. Even as new opportunities beckon for some, new pressures on water, air, soil and the ecosystems they are intrinsically a part of make it imperative to plan better for the future.

The webs of life on land and water that enable repair and renewal are under enormous strain, and the attendant issues figure prominently in the media and the market place, the courts and the legislatures, in the press and on the streets. How the relationship of ecology and equity, democracy and development will unfold will be an issue of central relevance in this our new century.

While there is reason for concern, there are grounds for hope, especially due to new and more innovative approaches that draw on scientific insight but address issues of a life with dignity especially for those who rely on nature for a living. Keeping those landscapes alive is as vital to a billion people as to the 500 mammals and 25000 flowering plants that share this piece of earth. Neither past nor the present offer magic solutions but they do provide ground for promising beginnings. Making space for nature in a way that democracy matters: this is the challenge and the way forward.

Mahesh Rangarajan is Director, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and Professor of Modern Indian History, University of Delhi. He read for a BA in History with Honours at Hindu College, Delhi and was Rhodes scholar at Balliol and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford for a MA and PhD in Modern History. His most recent books include the co-edited Environmental History as if Nature Existed (2010), Making Conservation Work (2007) and an edited Reader, Environmental Issues in India (2007). Forthcoming are a collection of essays, Nature and Nation (2013) and the co-edited Shifting Landscapes, People, Mobility, Animals in India’s Environmental Pasts. Professor Rangarajan has also been a political analyst and commentator on current affairs and ecological issues. In 2010, he chaired the Elephant Task Force of the Government of India. Form 2008-12 he was an expert member of the Forest Advisory Committee.

The lecture will be followed by reception.

Description

Based on her recent book, Reading North Korea (Harvard University Press, 2012), Sonia Ryang will present her views on cultural logic in North Korea, hoping to have an open discussion with the audience on recent “strange” events there, including nuclear weapons building on one hand and the basketball frenzy on the other.

Sonia Ryang was awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. She was a Research Fellow at Australian National University and taught at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and International Studies and C. Maxwell & Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair of Korean Studies, University of Iowa.

Description

The North Korea Research Group (NKRG) will present its research on the situation of North Korean refugee claimants in Canada and Toronto. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada shows that the number of North Korean refugee claimants in Canada has dramatically increased in the past few years.

The aim of this seminar is to consider the reasons that possibly explain this phenomenon, and better understand the settlement process of refugees, particularly in Toronto. In addition, we examine the role of non-governmental refugee organizations to highlight the differences in their approach and objectives. The social consequences and inter-group tensions of these developments are also addressed.

Our research is based on access-to-information requests to the government, interviews with various local organizations, and specific legal case studies. The content of our research presents original and up-to-date information on this important, yet largely unfamiliar issue.

Description

Based on anthropological fieldwork and archival research spanning the period 1987-2012, this paper describes and analyzes continuities, transformations, and cultural politics in Malaysia’s syariah judiciary during the past few decades and in the new millennium in particular. My comments are organized into three sections. The first focuses on historical continuities, with special reference to dynamics of gender, marriage, divorce, and “lawfare”. The second involves transformations. Of chief concern here are seemingly contradictory changes entailing both Islamization and the modeling of the syariah judiciary on its more powerful and prestigious civil-law counterpart; processes of bureaucratization and corporatization; and the expansion of the syariah judiciary with respect to criminal offenses (“creeping criminalization”). The third and final section of the paper addresses some of the comparative and other implications of my findings, including questions bearing on the relative uniqueness and generalizability of the Malaysian experience with state-sponsored Islamization.

Michael G. Peletz is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, with research interests in social and cultural theory, gender, sexuality, law, religion (especially Islam), and modernity, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. His books include Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times (Routledge, 2009), Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton University Press, 2002), Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society (University of California Press, 1996), and (with Aihwa Ong) Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 1995).

Description

PROGRAM:
4:00-6:00 Lecture & Discussion
6:00-7:00 Book signing & Informal reception

A Passion for Facts is an innovative study of the emergence of a “culture of fact” and its role in the making of modern China. Focusing especially on the history of the Chinese social survey movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this book analyzes how social facts generated by a diverse range of survey practices such as census, sociological investigation, and ethnography were mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation. It also shows how the production of social facts was itself a mass mobilization that involved not just the training of credible observers but also the making of new political subjects. By placing this previously unexamined dimension of Chinese history in a global context, A Passion for Facts is also a study of the histories of science, sentiment, colonialism, nationalism, and modern governance. As well, it sheds lights on the unusual pattern of political and economic development in China’s post-revolutionary era.

Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Department of History at the University of Toronto and the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is also a visual artist with ongoing photographic and documentary film projects on industrial and postindustrial ruins, as well as China’s hysterical transformation.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Informal pitches by high school students

Description

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF; 1958-1962) to denounce British and American Imperialism and to realize a communist utopia. Such efforts to transform China from a socialist to communist society failed disastrously, leading to the Great Famine during which an estimated 40 to 45 million Chinese died. While recent scholarship has mainly focused on the GLF’s catastrophic effects on human suffering, which includes brutal attacks on villagers, ruthless sexual assault of women, and mass starvation and resulting cannibalism, less attention has been directed to the making of calamity where hundreds of intellectuals, high ranking officials, and rank-and-file bureaucrats carried out investigative research that directly impinged on policies of the GLF. Situating in Mao Zedong’s methodological directives of investigative research, I call upon memoirs, interview narratives, historical documents, and archival data to examine practices and implications of Dingxing Yanjiu (定性研究) by the intellectuals. My presentation is part of a large project on politics of knowledge production during China’s GLF where I compare and contrast investigative research conducted by the above mentioned three distinctive groups.

Through workshops, courseware and scholarly publications, Dr. Ping-Chun Hsiung has contributed to the development and practices of Qualitative Research in Canada, China, and at the international platform. She is currently examining the politics of investigative research during China’s Great Leap Forward. Her scholarship has been published in English and Chinese and been translated into German. The widely used courseware Link Lives & Legacies: An Introduction to Qualitative Interviewing covers theoretical and technical issues in qualitative interviewing.

Description

Why do Burmese rites of passage (with exception of death rituals) not principally fall within the domain of Buddhist functionaries? Melford Spiro (1975) answered: ‘In short, I know of no satisfactory answer to this question, and having said so, can only move on’. Here we pause to reflect on a feature many practicing Buddhists share. Typically, monotheistic religions encompass life-cycle rituals within the body of their teachings for which they make their own functionaries responsible, thus welding laity and religious specialists into a religious and socio-cultural community. However, in the case of Burmese Buddhism, especially reproduction-related rituals such as marriage are typically left to ‘outside’ functionaries, such as ‘Brahmins’ (beiktheik saya as they are known and, in the case of Japanese Buddhism, to ‘Christian’ priests). To explore a tentative answer to this question, I propose we look at Van Gennep’s Rites of passage (1908), which he formulated as typical of ‘rectilinear’ and thickly ‘partitioned’ societies (which see life as one-off and directed), as distinct from a lesser emphasis on rites of passage in ‘circular’ or ‘thinly’ partitioned societies that substitute life-cycle ritual with rationality and with contemplation of the ‘philosophical [and psychological] significance’ of life (which see life in terms of rebirth as evolving by a multiplicity of causes). Van Gennep concluded his book saying that: ‘It is indeed a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant and animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the great rhythms of the universe.’ The manner in which Van Gennep gave substance to ‘ritual’, a word that did not enter into common use in the English language until the 1850s (Platvoet 2006), helps us appreciate how Burmese vipassana contemplation techniques so popular in Burma today operate on a continuum with other kinds of practices, such as ritual and philosophy, that also punctuate (awareness of) the transformation of the person, of the polity and of the cosmos, albeit in different ways.

Gustaaf Houtman edits and produces Anthropology Today for the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, and is a senior teaching fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Originally trained in Burmese language and literature along with anthropology, his fieldwork in the early 80s grappled with the popularization of vipassana contemplation since the mid-19th century in Burma for a PhD in anthropology with several dozen traditions surveyed, each with their own biographical, historical and literary trajectories, many of which have remained largely unstudied. Since the late 90s he has focused on soteriological liberation discourses associated with vipassana (insight contemplation) and samatha (concentration meditation) deployed by national leaders, including rhetoric (by Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi and others) aiming for release from (colonial and military) confinement, imprisonment and occupation.

Description

Indian cinema is now famous in the west, where ‘Bollywood’ is now widely used to mean any form of cinema from India. This talk focuses on ‘Bollywood’ meaning the mainstream Hindi cinema made in Bombay (Mumbai), mostly in the post-1991 period, as it examines the role it plays in the South Asian diaspora, the depictions of this diaspora and the impact of the diaspora on the film industry itself. The talk is illustrated with many subtitled clips.

Rachel Dwyer is a leading expert on India and Professor of Indian Culture and Cinema at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. She is fluent in both Hindi and Gujarati, and has several critically acclaimed books including One Hundred Bollywood Films and Yash Chopra. Along with writing an acclaimed book on director Yash Chopra she has also worked closely with him, and has had several of her publications launched, not only by him, but also by Bollywood powerhouses Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar and Shahrukh Khan. Currently, she is the editor of two book series on South Asian cinema: one with Oxford University Press, Delhi, the other with Indiana University Press. She is also a sought after lecturer, having delivered influential talks in a wide range of venues. She has, for example, recently spoken on Raj Kapoor for the British Film Institute’s Key Scholars in Film Studies Seminar Series at King’s College London, on “Islamicate or Islamophobic?: Muslims in Hindi Cinema,” at Brown University, and on the “Hindi Film Biopic and the New Indian Cinema” at the University of Sidney. Dwyer has to two exciting new forthcoming publications: Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Modern India, and, The Cultural History of the Indian Elephant.

Celebrating the Asian Heritage Month

Description

Please purchase tickets at: http://canadakorea.eventbrite.ca/

This conference consists of three panel discussions and a keynote address by The Honourable Yonah Martin, the first person of Korean origin to be named as a Senator in Canada. Our conference aims to raise awareness about the key milestones and turning points in the history of bilateral relations between Canada and Korea; to generate cross-disciplinary discussions on various aspects of the bilateral relations, encompassing immigration, trade, culture and religion; and to inspire discussions on the past and future of the Korean immigrant community in Canada, as well as the Canadian community in Korea.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced in Dec 2012, the year 2013 has been designated as the Year of Korea in Canada, which aims to highlight Korea’s culture, traditions and diversity, and celebrate the contributions of the Korean community to Canadian society. Canada and Korea’s strong relationship is underpinned by a rapidly growing trade relations that reached nearly $11.7 billion in 2011, close cooperation at international level on democratic and human rights issues, and strong people-to-people ties, including through immigration, educational programs and tourism.

As we reflect upon our five decades of incredibly fruitful bilateral relationship, we hope you could join us for an engaging discussion on various aspects of Canadian-Korean relations and help plan what lies ahead of us.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

8:30-9:00 AM
Breakfast & Registration

9:00-9:30 AM
Welcome Remarks
Dr. Ito Peng (Centre for the Study of Korea)
Ms. Jacqueline An (Korean Women’s International Network)
Dr. Greg Donaghy (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada)

9:30-9:45 AM
Introductory Remarks by Mr. Kwang-Kyun Chung, Consul-General of the Republic of Korea

9:45-10:45 AM
Keynote Address by The Honourable Senator Yonah Martin: “Bridging the Gap”
Appreciation by Ms. Eunice Kim, KOWIN Vice-President

10:45-11:00 AM
Coffee break

11:00-12:30 PM
Panel discussion #1
“Korean-Canadian Relations during the Cold War”
Dr. Robert Bothwell (Professor, University of Toronto): “The Korean War & Canada”
Dr. Greg Donaghy (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada): “The Reluctant Suitor: Canada – South Korean Relations in the Cold War’s Shadow, 1947-1973”
Mr. Robert Lee (Former Canadian Trade Commissioner to the ROK): “Korea: From a Recipient of Canadian Aid to a Vibrant Bi-lateral Trade and Investment Relationship.”
Moderator: Ms. Tina Park (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Toronto)

12:30-1:30 PM
Korean Buffet Luncheon

1:30-3:00 PM
Panel discussion #2 “People Matters: Human & Intellectual Exchanges between Canada and Korea in the 20th-21st century”
The Honourable Very Reverend Lois Wilson (Former Moderator of the United Church of Canada): “People to People Exchanges Between Canada and Korea”
Mr. Jae Chong (Korean Canadian Cultural Association): “The formation and development of the Korean-Canadian Community”
Professor Ann Kim (York University) TBC
Moderator: Mr. Minsuk Kim (JD/MBA Candidate, University of Toronto)

3:00-3:15 PM
Coffee break

3:15-4:45 PM
Panel discussion #3
“Moving forward: What lies ahead between Canada & Korea”
Ms. Young-Hae Lee (President, Canada Korea Society): “Living in the World Family: Public Diplomacy – Contributions & Prospects”
Mr. Randall Baran-Chong (Lawyer) “A Hope and a Home: Envisioning Canada as a Leader on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees”
Mr. Ins Choi (Playwright) “Kim’s Convenience: The Story Behind the Play”
Moderator: Mr. Colum Grove-White (War Child Canada)

4:45-5:00 PM
Closing Remarks by Dr. Mairi MacDonald, Director of International Relations Programme & Final Words of Appreciation by Ms. Tina Park, Conference Chair

5:00-6:00 PM
Networking Reception (cash bar)

For any media inquiries or questions, please contact koreacanada50@gmail.com or 647-228-5705

Please view the event poster here