Description

The increasing prominence of East Asia has prompted a new round of scholarly debate about whether/how the patterns of conflicts and stability in this region can be understood from existing theories of international relations. Some claim that the patterns in East Asia cannot be explained by the conventional Eurocentric framework. Others, by contrast, note that the patterns of interstate interactions in East Asia can be explained by the standard structural-realist theory. In this presentation, Dr. Kohno will critically review both sides of the debate and argue that, in order to capture what is really at stake, we need to develop a new theoretical perspective that endogenizes what constitutes “units” (states) and what constitutes “the system” (interstate system) in their constant interactions.

Description

Interested in applying for the Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia-Pacific Studies? Gain valuable feedback and strengthen your proposal at this application-writing workshop.

• Receive tips and tricks from faculty and past winners
• Bring your application draft to receive one-on-one constructive feedback

The Dr. David Chu Scholarships provide funding for undergraduate and graduate student travel to the Asia-Pacific region for study and research purposes. The application deadline is March 15, please visit the website for details: http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/current/graduate/schps/scholarships-with-a-march-15-deadline/dr-david-chu-scholarships-in-asia-pacific-studies

Description

In this seminar we present the analysis from two large surveys on young people’s early career formation conducted in Tokyo and Toronto. Our surveys show that both Canadian and Japanese youths are finding it more difficult to achieve their careers. In both countries, young people are taking longer time finding their career jobs and living with their parents longer. However, Canadian and Japanese youths are also different in terms of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, and in terms of their gender-based experiences in the labour market and expectations of work, and in their co-residency patterns with their parents.

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Mami Iwakami is a Professor at University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo (Japan). Her special field is Sociology, and major research area is Modern Japanese Family. In the past ten years, she has organized funded research projects, as follows: The Relationships between Young Adults and Their Middle Aged Parents in Low Fertility/Aging Society (2001-2004), International Comparison on Gender based Differences in The Process of Youth’s Career Formation (2006-2008), International Comparative Research on The Support Systems for Youth’s Career Formation (2009-present).

Ito Peng is the Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary & International Affairs, and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto. She teaches political sociology, comparative welfare states, and public policy, specializing in family, gender, and labour market policies, and has written extensively on these topics. Her current research includes: 1) social investment policies in Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea; 2) an international comparative research project on demography, gender, and care migration; and 3) an international comparative research on labour market dualization. Professor Peng is an associate researcher for the UNRISD. Dr. Peng received her Ph.D. from London School of Economics.

Description

North Korea is a workshop of democracy in today’s world. The human rights of North Korean refugees define the global democracy project, while the marketization in North Korea is exalted as a forerunner of democratization. At this juncture, this talk construes North Korean refugees as the displaced from the common properties and state-assigned jobs and examines the consequent process of their commodification. It takes the memory of socialism as a site where the state and individuals reconfigure their relationship. In specific, the talk discusses the North Korean state’s double edged relation with the emergent capitalist order which prompts an inquiry into the reconstituted meaning of socialism. It also probes subjectivities of the displaced who respond to the trinity of the market, evangelism, and ethnic nationalism, and articulate memories of socialism in their imagination of the new common.

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Hyun Ok Park is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Desire for Return: Colonial Memory, Neoliberal Capitalism, and the Korean Transnational Migration.” She is the author of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005).

Description

The widely-lauded progressive achievements of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines during the early decades of the 20th century included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying humanism. In this presentation, I discuss how emergent media of communication established under U.S. colonial rule contributed to the implementing of universal standards of human life and experience towards the formation of citizen-man, as the currency and code required for Filipinos’ political self-rule. I analyse the reorganization of subjective and social life entailed by U.S. imperial forms of governmentality, particularly the gender and racial effects of social accommodations to the protocols of personhood of citizen-man, through the media apparatuses of literature, photography, and radio. Finally, I examine other modes of sensorial experience and perceptibility and forms of human and social life that are remaindered, devalued and/or rendered illegible in the reconfiguration of natives according to the normative ideals and structures of liberal democracy. And I reflect on the significance of this archaeology of seemingly defunct forms of life in the context of contemporary claims of the demise of normative cultures of citizenship in neoliberalist, postdisciplinary societies of the current moment.

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Neferti Tadiar is professor and chair of women’s studies at Barnard College. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; and Philippine studies. Her work concerns the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. While her research focuses on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change, she addresses, more broadly, questions of gender, race, and sexuality in discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization. She is currently working on a book-project entitled: Discourse on Empire: Living Under the Rule of Permanent War and beginning a new research project entitled Schooling National Subjects: Experience and Education in US Colonial Philippines. Her books include: Things Fall Away: Philippine Literatures, Historical Experience and Tangential Makings of Globality (Duke University Press, 2009),Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, co-edited with Angela Y. Davis (Palgrave Press, 2005), and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press/ Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004). She is winner of the Philippine National Book Award (2005).

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

In the global north, falling birthrates, an ageing population, and increased women’s paid employment are creating a huge demand for child and elder care; while in the global south, growing unemployment and underemployment are pushing women to seek work abroad. In this symposium, we discuss how changes in fertility, ageing population and women’s employment patterns in Canada, Japan, and South Korea are driving up demands for care, how these governments are responding through immigration and employment policies, and what these changes mean for global migration.

KEYNOTE SPEECH
Shahra Razavi (Coordinator, Gender and Development, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD))

PANEL DISCUSSION
Moderator:
Ito Peng (University of Toronto)

Panelists:
Shahra Razavi (UNRISD)
Monica Boyd (University of Toronto)
Susan McDaniel (University of Lethbridge)
Hykyung Lee (Pai Chai University)
Wako Asato (Kyoto University)
Rachel Silvey (University of Toronto)

Description

The Asian Institute’s Chu program organized the second year of an annual field school delegation to Taiwan in December 2010. The students, which comprised both ASI and other A&S students, travelled to Taiwan for a week, during which time they met with and interviewed officials in government (including Taiwan’s former Premier), leaders in industry and academia, as well as social movement / NGO activists. The students also prepared papers in advance of their trip, which they presented seminar-style to the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the National Chengchi University.

The Field School Seminar is a forum for our students to present their work, their thoughts on Taiwan and the Asia region more generally. They will also reflect on the importance of travel and field work.

The program will be as follows:

1. WELCOME

Professor Joseph Wong, Director, Asian Institute
Professor Tong Lam, Department of Historical Studies, UTM

2. THE FIELD SCHOOL

Michela Sisti

3. PANEL: POSITIONING GLOBAL TAIWAN

Nabila Qureshi, The Politics of Music in Taiwan
Discussant, Zannah Mae Matson

Ayden Scheim, The Flipside of Democratization in Global Taiwan: Global Civil Society, The Taiwanese State, and Challenges to Gay Rights and Sexual Freedom
Discussant, Jasmine Jin

Zhiying Zhang, Yummy Taiwan: Savour a Real Taiwan in Taiwanese Food
Discussant, Michel Marion

Mueen Hakak, Trade and Trade-offs: The Evolution, Impact and Risks of Taiwan-ChinaTrade
Discussant, Jong Park

Andrew Do
Discussant, Peter Wills

4. DISCUSSION AND Q&A

Description

As the market reform deepened in the post-1992 years, official corruption in China has undergone an exponential growth and become a top source of dissatisfaction for the general public. In the same period, sea changes occurred in the structure of Chinese media, which now perform the multiple, oftentimes conflicting tasks of making political propaganda, catering to advertisers, and speaking to viewers’ concerns. Amid all these changes, television drama became a key venue for representing official corruption and a key site of contestations among various social and discursive powers. A multiplicity of meanings of corruption appears on Chinese television despite the fact that the official anticorruption discourse has remained largely stable. In this paper I will first provide an overview of the different ways corruption is imagined on Chinese television in the context of media commercialization and then focus on a
2009 drama hit “Snail House” to illustrate the tendency of Chinese commercial television to normalize corruption in pursuit of (imagined) middle-class viewers in the context of globalizing neoliberal rationality.
Political implications of such a tendency will be discussed.

Prof. Ruoyun Bai is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Humanities. As well as Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersection of media, power and popular culture. She published on media commercialization in China, cultural politics of television dramas, culture jamming through digital media, etc.

Description

PROGRAM

2:00-2:05 Welcoming Address: Consul General Hong Ji-In

2:05-2:10 Keynote Speech: Revered Yoon, Citizens’ Alliance

2:10-2:20 Opening Remarks: MP Barry Devolin

2:20-2:40 Panel Opening Speeches:

Representative, HanVoice
Ms Eom and Mr. Kim, Citizens’ Alliance
Mr. Kyung-Bok Lee, CNKHR
Ms Pam Shime, Global Advocacy Leadership Institute

2:40-3:10 Panel Discussion (moderated by MP Devolin) with Q&A

3:10-3:15 Closing Remarks: Randall Baran-Chong, HanVoice

3:15-3:25 Rev. Benjamin Yoon to introduce video “The Plight of North Korean Refugees in China”

3:30-4:00 Reception

Description

An overview of 40 years of Canada-China relations, highlighting personal encounters, perception and misperception, policies and performance, the elephant’s shadow, Canada’s fall, and China’s rise.

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Bernie Michael Frolic is Professor Emeritus, Political Science, York University and Senior Researcher, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. He is also Visiting Professor, Beiwai University Graduate Center in Canadian Studies (Beijing). He first visited China in 1965. His published works include Mao’s People; Civil Society in China( with Tim Brook); and Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the PRC, l949-1970 (with Paul Evans). He is currently completing a book-length study on Canada-China relations from 1970 to the present.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

In any listing of the world’s top international financial centres, Hong Kong takes a prominent place. How secure is that place, and what factors increase the odds that it will remain in the first tier of IFCs? Based on extensive fieldwork and comparative analysis, this study assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Hong Kong’s IFC and draws out the implications for Hong Kong of recent developments on the Mainland. Notwithstanding rapidly changing regional and international markets, Hong Kong’s resilient financial sector remains rooted in distinctive social and political foundations. The strategic challenge for both the public sector and the private sector is to bolster those foundations without compromising that resilience.

Dr. Louis W. Pauly holds the Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Governance at the University of Toronto, where he also directs the Centre for International Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs. A graduate of Cornell University, the London School of Economics, New York University, and Fordham University, he has been a visiting professor at Oxford University, Northwestern University, and Osaka City University. Before his appointment as a professor in Toronto, he held management positions in the Royal Bank of Canada, won an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on the staff of the International Monetary Fund. His publications include Global Ordering: Institutions and Autonomy in a Changing World (UBC Press, 2009), Complex Sovereignty: Reconstituting Political Authority in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2005), and The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton University Press, 1998). With Emanuel Adler, he edits International Organization, a top-ranked journal in the fields of international relations and international political economy.

Description

The Munk School of Global Affairs is pleased to announce the 2011 Graduate Student Conference. This year’s conference, Empty Stomachs and Loaded Rifles: Food Scarcity and Global Security, promises to ignite a timely discussion of the leading issues confronting the global community in the 21st century. Specifically, the conference will explore the critical links between food shortage and conflict. Indeed, issues of food scarcity and global security are increasingly inseparable. As such, the conference will stimulate panel discussions on three leading themes, namely Control and Equity of Food Supply, Food Scarcity as a Catalyst for Political Unrest, and Weaponization of Food.

The conference will be held at the University of Toronto from March 24th – 25th. On March 24th, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, will deliver a special address via videoconference. This will be followed by a keynote address by Peter Gill, author of “Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid”. The three panel discussions will be held on March 25th. Among the panelists are filmmaker and journalist Alexandre Trudeau, coauthor of “Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea” Stephan Haggard, former Deputy Commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan Lt. General Andrew Leslie, and Ambassador John Schram (Ret’d).

For the conference website and registration details, please visit: https://www.munkschool.utoronto.ca/mgc/

Student registration is $10.00 and regular registration is $15.00.

For further information, contact us at:
munk.graduateconference@utoronto.ca

We look forward to seeing you there!

Conference agenda:
March 24th, 2011

5:00 p.m. – Registration Begins

5:45 p.m. – Special Address by Jeffrey Sachs (Via Video Conference)
Director, Earth Institute, Columbia University

6:00 p.m. – Keynote Address Peter Gill
Author, “Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid”

7:00 p.m. – Reception

March 25th, 2011

9:00 a.m. – Registration Opens (coffee and tea served)

9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Panel 1: Control and Equity of Food Supply
Panelists:
Dr. Harriet Friedmann
Dr. Sabrina Schulz
Mr. Alexandre Trudeau
Chair: Mr. Brian Stewart

11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. – Lunch break

1:15 p.m. – 2:50 p.m.

Panel 2: Food Scarcity as a Catalyst for Political Unrest
Panelists:
Dr. John Schram
Mr. Peter Gill
Mr. Alexandre Trudeau
Chair: Dr. Sabrina Schulz

2:50 p.m. – 3:10 p.m. – Break

3:10 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.

Panel 3: Weaponization of Food
Panelists:
Dr. Stephan Haggard
Lt. General Andrew Leslie
Dr. Ellen Messer
Chair: Dr. Jean-Yves Haine

Description

Bryant Garth’s lecture will focus on issues explored in his recent book Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire, co-authored with Yves Dezalay (University of Chicago Press, 2010). His lecture will analyse varied colonial experiences of several South and Southeast Asian countries and address the increasing importance of the law and lawyers in the region. Tracing the transformation of the relationship between law and state in different colonial settings, Dean Garth will discuss how nationalist legal elites — in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and South Korea — came to wield political power as agents in the move toward national independence.Including fieldwork from over 350 interviews, Asian Legal Revivals illuminates the more recent past and present of these legally changing nations and explains the profession’s recent revival of influence, as spurred on by America geopolitical and legal interests.

Biography
Bryant Garth is Dean and Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School, and past Director of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). The author or co-author of more than 16 books and 75 articles, his research focus is on the legal profession, dispute resolution, globalization and the rule of law. Drawing on this expertise, he has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development and major philanthropic foundations.

Description

In the face of economic decline, nagging un(der)employment, and increasing disparity and insecurity in daily survival, the Japanese have been hit by nationwide anxiety. Once proud of its high economic growth and “miracle” economy, the country is better known today for the precarity rather than productivity of its populace. Suicide has been precipitously high since 1998 and today is the leading cause of death for youth between the ages of 18 and 24. But middle aged Japanese have been hit too by the “de-regularization” of labor and life prospects: from lifelong jobs centered around family and home, Japan today has a flexible labor force and decentered intimate attachments. Yet in precarious times, new potentials for life, sociality, and horizons of expectation arise as well. In this talk, I look at attempts being made to address today’s “pain of life” (ikizurasa) by what I argue to be a politics of precariousness in 21st century Japan.

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Professor Anne Allison is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of Anthropology at Duke University and author of three books: Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006), Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-HarperCollins 1996, re-released by University of California Press 2000) and Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press 1994). Her research specialties include Mass Culture, Neoliberalism, Gender and Sexuality, and Globalization. She is currently working on a book about precarity and emerging sociality in the context of 21st century Japan. She is also co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology.

Description

The Partition of colonial India in 1947 resulted in more than half a million dead and the displacement of about 12 million people. Officially, 75,000 women were brutally abducted and raped and millions of children disappeared in the ‘civil war’ that accompanied the last years of the British colonial rule. The uprooted millions were transformed into official ‘refugees’. In this ‘civil war’, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs were engulfed in the ‘genocidal violence’, but they did not challenge the power of the departing colonial state, which was grounded in violence. The break-up of colonial India has been a subject of extensive historical research: from the ‘high politics’ leading to the Partition, to the story of 1946-1947 riots continuing till 1948, and more recently to the recovery of memories of victims, refugees and women’s narratives via alternative archives.

This talk explores the possibility of writing a parallel history of this violent historical event. It frames Partition and its prehistory within an individual subjectivity of a ‘non-refugee’ in a locality. It focuses on a human testimony (not legal) of a rural woman called Subhashini (1914-2003), an obscure colonial subject living in postcolonial times. Recalling not 1947, but 1942 as a violent rupture in her memory, the testimony moves beyond a historical event and established facts. This presentation offers a parallel history of ‘events’ and ‘non-events’, testimony and experience, and suggests the insertion of a small, unknown, unexplored history in the existing historical narration. Subhashini’s candid, conflicted, repetitive narrative reveals the shifts, ambiguities, silences in an individual memory and its intersection with and divergence from collective memory. The recreated narrative defies the opposition between subject and agent, victim and victimizer and unfolds an individual’s multiple and uncertain identities and subjectivities as a counterpoise to the notion of a unitary colonial subject. Partition is a moment of celebration, revenge, divine retribution, empathy, remorse, tragedy, and fear. This talk also engages with the notion of truth, fiction, archive, testimony, translation and narrative in the language of history-writing, and rethinks the relationship between history and memory and the historian’s craft.

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Dr Nonica Datta is currently Visiting Professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto from January to April 2011.She received her Ph.D from Cambridge University, UK after studying for her MA and M.Phil degrees at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is an Associate Professor of History at Miranda House in the University of Delhi. She was recently a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi and a Visiting Professor at the University of Humboldt, Berlin. Previously she has held positions at the Departments of History at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, where she was also Deputy Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies. Her publications include Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (Oxford University Press, 1999); and Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony (Oxford University Press, 2010 [2009]), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Award.

Description

MARCH 28 to APRIL 1

Please stop by to fold a crane and make a donation. Guided instructions for the origami will be provided.

Proceeds go to Canadian Red Cross, earmarked for Japan Earthquake/Asia-Pacific Tsunami relief. Cranes will be sent to Japan. Tax receipts are available for donations starting from $20.

For information: ai.asianstudies@utoronto.ca | 416 946 8832

Description

The new Undergraduate Minor Program in South Asian Studies offers students a chance to acquire a deep understanding of ancient and contemporary South Asia. The courses offer an interdisciplinary approach that emphasize the history and development of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka’s political, cultural and social institutions, the nature of the economy and the significance of class and ideology in the modern dynamics of continuity and change.

For students interested in learning more about the South Asian Studies Minor Program, this info session will include presentations from faculty, staff and students, as well as a Q&A period.

Light refreshments will be served.

Description

Often referred to as a ‘wonder grass,’ bamboo has in recent years become an important input for sustainable products. A proliferation of new bamboo-based products, such as flooring, sideboards and textiles, have the common attribute of depending on new forms of industrial processing and sophisticated global supply chains. In this paper, I examine this boom in bamboo products from the vantage point of the north-central coast of Vietnam, a region that falls outside of the locus of large-scale industrial bamboo production in China, but that has been pulled into the circuits of industrial bamboo production through collaborations between a number of foreign investors and development institutions. Drawing on performativity theory, I examine the means through which various articulation of value were framed within the context of an attempt to ‘modernize’ Vietnam’s bamboo sector through interventions in industrial processing and supply chain management. I point to a paradox, whereby local trade networks have been unresponsive to interventions to raise prices and increase supply, even as buyers were willing to pay a substantial price premium to farmers. In doing so, I review how these performances of economic valuation intersected with local trade relationships and farmer livelihoods, which positioned many of the buyers of higher ‘value’ products at a distinct disadvantage. I argue that the points at which global purchasers and development planners articulated with local trade networks became new sites of value negotiation, and that it is within these various encounters that we can locate the possibilities of sustainable futures for bamboo and bamboo producers.

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Jim Delaney is a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto.

Description

The political foundation of North Korea, like those of Vietnam and China, is based on moral legitimacy deriving from the historical experience of armed resistance against colonial domination. However, North Korea is distinct from other Asian revolutionary postcolonial states in that its revolutionary heritage, in postcolonial history, has been increasingly reduced to a handful of historical actors and, ultimately, radically personified. This lecture will reflect on North Korea’s distinct political history with reference to two relevant ideas in historical sociology: Clifford Geertz’s “paradigm of the exemplary centre” and Weberian notions of political power and authority with which Geertz’s symbolic approach to power engages. It will ask what lessons we can learn from Weber’s treatise on the nature and historicity of charismatic authority in trying to come to terms with North Korea’s established stateliness and its contemporary political process.

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Heonik Kwon is reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics and has conducted fieldwork in Russian Siberia, central Vietnam and, most recently, in Korea. He is the author of Ghosts of War in Vietnam, which received the inaugural George Kahin prize in 2009 from the Association for Asian Studies, and After the Massacre, winner of the first Clifford Geertz prize in 2007 from the American Anthropological Association. His new book, The Other Cold War, was published in 2010 by Columbia University Press. Currently, Heonik Kwon directs an international collaborative research project on the contemporary histories of the Korean War supported by the Academy of Korean Studies.

Description

For years, the Hong Kong economy has been designated as the freest economy in the world, but the more relevant question is the context of Hong Kong’s economic freedom. Hong Kong’s paradigm of economic freedom has often served as lessons for other emerging economies. The speaker will first explore the economic fundamentals and examine the contemporary economic issues in Hong Kong. The context and essence of economic freedom will then be discussed and elaborated. The seminar evolves around a number of theoretical, empirical and conceptual discussions on the Hong Kong economy.

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Dr. Kui-Wai Li is Associate Professor, Department of Economics and Finance, and Director, APEC Study Center, College of Business, City University of Hong Kong, and has obtained his academic qualification mainly from British universities. Dr. Li teaches mainly Asia Pacific economics. His research interests range from political economy of Asian development, China’s economic growth and productivity, industry and trade to globalization and financial crisis. His research outputs include a number of academic referee papers, chapters, research reports and books. He is currently completing his second book on the Hong Kong economy, giving particular emphasis on economic freedom. Dr. Li is visiting the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, from January to March 2011. The address of his personal webpage is: http://fbstaff.cityu.edu.hk/efkwli

Description

Since the 1980s, rural Java, Indonesia has been the site of striking socio-economic improvement. In a matter of years, forlorn and poverty clad villages became brightly lit spaces, with many amenities. This improved living standard has been accompanied, however, by an overreaching, if not squanderous, life style. A large portion of the farmers’ hard earned wealth is spent on cigarettes, electronic appliances, motorcycles, house renovations, mobile phones and communal projects such as oversized mosque.

How can we properly understand this phenomenon without falling into either the colonial myth of the profligate native, or the contemporary attitude of treating anthropological subjects as victims of forces beyond their control—be it colonial policies, exploitation by the Northern rich countries, friction between local and global political-economic power, or the political-economic regimes’ will to improve?

The talk will address this problem based on historical-ethnographic data from an upland Java farming community, and highlight the dialectics between the force of accumulation and force of distribution within the community, and what Edward Said termed the critical relationality between the farmers and the bigger world.

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Dr Pujo Semedi is a professor at the Dept. of Anthropology, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia where he teaches Indonesian Rural Economies and Ethnographic Research Method. In the last fifteen years Dr Semedi has conducted historical-ethnographic research on Java’s fishing, farming and plantation communities to see how differential access to crucial resources leads to variations in socio-cultural configurations. He is a contributor to the Netherlands’ Institute of Anthropology and Linguistic (KITLV)’s project “In Search of Middle Indonesia”, a research collaborator in the Universite de Montreal based ChATSEA (Challenge of Agrarian Transformation in Southeast Asia) program, and a co-researcher with Professor Tania Li on the project “Producing Wealth and Poverty in Indonesia’s New Rural Economies”. He is currently visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology and David Chu Distinguished Speaker at the University of Toronto.

Description

Michael Danagher entered the Trade Commissioner Service in 1987. Overseas assignments have included Lagos and Seoul, and, as Senior Trade Commissioner, at missions in Hanoi and Budapest. He is currently in his second assignment in Korea, as Minister-Counsellor and Senior Trade Commissioner. At headquarters, he has worked in the commodity trade policy division, Africa and Europe trade divisions, and as Deputy Director responsible for Taiwan affairs. More recently, he was responsible for the assignment process for the Trade Commissioner Service, and, prior to his current posting, was responsible for commercial relations with non-EU Europe and Central Asia. Mike has a BA from the University of Ottawa and an MBA from McGill University.

Description

The Asia-Pacific Club and the Korea Club present the University of Toronto’s first weekly Korean language exchange. Students who would like to practice their spoken Korean can engage with students who speak Korean as their native language to improve their fluency and confidence. All students are welcome.

Description

The concepts of regime legitimacy and legitimation are simultaneously ambiguous, contested, multi-faceted and dynamic, and they have been used to describe and explain tremendously complex phenomena. Any effective use of the concepts depends on careful definitions and sensitivity to time, context, culture and levels of analysis. Currently Chinese and western discourses on the subjects also exhibit a wide range of conflicting opinions and approaches. Authoritarian (and developing) countries such as China rely on a whole range of modes of legitimation, but the degrees of success are constantly changing, and legitimacy and coercion/suppression often go hand in hand. Moreover, the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of legitimation to mobilize consent cannot be ignored. China is now confronted by the choices amongst the various sources of legitimacy, such as economic growth/social equity, eudaemonic/moral and spiritual claims and stability/dynamism. By referring to the above framework and the impressive and growing new literature on legitimacy, the paper attempts to explore the dynamics and dimensions of legitimacy and legitimation in China today.

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Alfred L. Chan is Professor and Chair at the Department of Political Science, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario, Canada. The author of Mao’s Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China’s Great Leap Forward (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Chan has published in journals such as The China Journal, Studies on Contemporary China, and Pacific Affairs. Recent publications include “Power, Policy and Elite Politics under Zhao Ziyang,” The China Quarterly, September, 2010; “Mao: A Super Monster?’ in G. Benton and Lin Chun, eds., Was Mao Really a Monster? (New York: Routledge, 2010); and several edited volumes of Chinese Law and Government. A chapter entitled “Authoritarian Legitimacy and Legitimation in China” will be included in the book Reviving Legitimacy: Lessons for and from China (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Dr. Chan has been an associate with the Asian Institute since 2003.

Description

During the Korean War, a particular figure of warfare took center stage at the armistice negotiations – the “prisoner of war.” Although scholars have often dismissed the POW controversy as a mere Cold War propaganda ploy mobilized by all sides involved, this talk will argue that the POW controversy revealed another significance to the Korean War as the debate brought the 1949 Geneva Conventions to a crisis. Claims to the legitimate interpretation and application of the “laws of war” were at stake – in essence, to define the prisoner was to define the war.
This talk will examine the stakes involved in the POW debate through more unexpected sites of analysis – practices of violence inside the POW camps, negotiations inside the interrogation rooms, and the production of a U.S. military bureaucratic archive around the POW. An analysis of how violence, interrogation, and bureaucracy formed the landscape on which the U.S. military attempted to form the figure of the POW is crucial to understand why on May 7, 1952, after “kidnapping” U.S. POW camp commander Brigadier General Francis Dodd, a group of thirty Korean prisoners of war made an initial request for 1,000 sheets of paper. The POW was an emphatically bureaucratic figure of war, and the POWs were asserting control over the bureaucratic procedures of defining the POW. As these POWs understood, the struggle over the legitimate forms of “war” on the global stage in the 1950s impacted what claims could be made on decolonization – the POWs themselves were making these claims alongside the delegates and military commanders, reconfiguring the landscape of violence, interrogation, and bureaucracy in their own attempts to intervene in the discourse of “war.”

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Monica Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Humanity Interrogated: Empire, Nation, and the Political Subject in the U.S.-controlled POW Camps of the Korean War, 1942-1960,” examines how POWs, military personnel, and government officials struggled to define the “prisoner of war” as a political subject during the early Cold War, as interrogation became the most relied-upon tool of the U.S. military for constructing, disciplining, and presenting the prisoner of war. She is currently a Graduate Student Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at Michigan for 2010-2011.

Description

In my paper, I explore appropriations of advertising into popular culture in contemporary South Korea. I emphasize that South Korean advertising publics, rather than relating ads to personally relevant problems of everyday life and consuming them privately, often read ads as a social commentary and a public intervention, expecting advertisers to engage with social issues and contribute to broadly understood improvements of society. To capture this complex dynamic, my paper considers critical engagements with advertising in diaries, blogs, and mass media. I demonstrate how, on some occasions, advertisers were pressured to accommodate the publics’ sensibilities and demands, whereas, on others, the publics readily interpreted ads in a way that compromised their needs and interests as potential consumers. Further, my paper questions the popularity of the so-called “humanistic” advertising, heavily praised by South Korean advertising consumers and producers alike. Its heart-warming messages employ melodramatic conventions to generate pathos by asserting the primacy of humanistic values, which results in a paradoxical situation, where commercial advertising offers a refuge for sentiments that are often critical of the dominant neoliberal ideologies, which prize competition and economic rationality. Overall, I reflect on how advertising, as any popular culture product, combines impulses of containment and resistance in contradictory ways and problematize the commonsensical notion that advertising as a social institution performs an identical role in different societies.

—

Olga Fedorenko is a PhD candidate at the East Asian Studies Department of the University of Toronto. Her research deals with discourses and practices of advertising in contemporary South Korea, and her dissertation draws on a 14-month fieldwork in Seoul, which included an internship at a major advertising agency and observation at an advertising review board. Olga also holds MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, MBA from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and BA in Korean Studies from Moscow State University in Russia.

Description

This two-campus series will feature ethnographic films by young Tibetans from within China and young Burmese filmmakers, a lecture and film on Buddhism in Burma, and a workshop on documentary film and development in Asia. Interesting similarities between Burmese and Tibetan cultures – both of which flourish in strongly Buddhist, intellectually rich yet economically poor communities living within difficult political boundaries – make this cross-cultural comparison especially compelling. The weekend will feature works of emerging and established Tibetan filmmakers, most of which have never been shown outside China, Burmese students participating in the Yangon Film School, and established Anglo-Burman filmmaker Lindsey Merrison. Films will be followed by discussions with invited Toronto filmmakers. Discussions will also focus on the special value of participatory film projects for young people living in threatened cultural groups and on the potential of open access and open source tools and practices for these communities. The event venues will be enhanced by a stunning exhibit of images by Plateau Photographers, an open participatory photography project that trains minority students in western China.

A bus to UTSC will leave from in front of Hart House (Hart House Circle) at 11:15 am, and again at 5:30pm. It will return to Hart House from UTSC at the end of the day around 9 pm. All are welcome on the bus. For questions, contact aep@utsc.utoronto.ca or 416.208.4769

FRIDAY FEB. 18, Noon-9 pm
BUDDHISM, DEVELOPMENT, AND NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING IN MYANMAR
Location: UTSC, LL Browne Theatre (12 – 5 PM) and AA-112 (7 – 9 PM)

12-1:00
Introduction: Frances Garrett and Leslie Chan
Lecture: Lindsey Merrison and Eh Mwee
In 2005, Anglo-Burma Director and Producer Lindsey Merrison and seven other experienced filmmakers mounted the first Art of Documentary Filmmaking workshop in Myanmar, during which they trained 12 young Burmese men and women to develop their own skills as documentarians. Lindsey has since mounted a second workshop, The Art of Documentary Editing (2006), and founded the non-profit organization, Yangon Film School – Association for the Promotion of Young Burmese Film and Video Artists, with the aim of setting up a permanent school in Yangon with a regular curriculum. This series was expanded in 2009 with the release of Stories from Myanmar, which showcases the work of participants of the 2007 Yangon Film School workshops in Myanmar.
A member of the Karen ethnic group, Eh Mwee comes to Toronto for this event from Myanmar. She is a director, cinematographer and editor who joined YFS in 2005, after which she married, returned to Bangkok to finish her Master’s degree in gender studies, returned to Myanmar to have a child, joined Oxfam, and later worked as a freelance evaluator for NGOs. She came back to YFS in 2009, where she rediscovered her passion for filmmaking.

1:00-2:30
Film: “Stories from Myanmar”
The work of 12 new participants from The Art of Documentary Filmmaking Beginners Workshop 2007, who were given the opportunity to grapple with the technical, artistic and ethical aspects of the genre by producing their own short documentaries on the topic of children in Myanmar. This DVD contains their first film exercises: Stories from the Princess Hotel; their final films: Children in Myanmar; and a short film About the Beginners’ Workshop. Stories of Change features projects by students of several YFS courses completed during The Art of Documentary Filmmaking Stage Two in 2007. Made for two NGOs, Metta Development Foundation and International Development Enterprise, these documentaries portray people from Kachin State, southern Shan State and the Ayeyarwaddy Delta who describe, in their own emotive and surprisingly humorous words, how development organisations are making a real difference to their lives. The body of work bears witness to a growing nucleus of talented young Burmese filmmakers who are striving to create challenging work in an environment notorious for discouraging independent media. Their films provide a hitherto unseen window on the lives of ordinary people in Myanmar.

2:30-2:50
Discussion with filmmakers and audience

2:50-3:00
Break

3:00-5:00
Workshop on participatory media for international development
Weekend participants will join local Toronto documentary filmmakers and professors and students in UTSC’s program in new media and international development studies to discuss the potential of new media practices for international development. Our conversation will consider the theory and practice of “participatory development,” whether participatory media makes development more open and inclusive, and how new modes of access to and participation in media-making may alter the practice and conceptualization of development.

5:00-6:30
Dinner break

6:30-9:00
Lecture: “Spirits, Ghosts, Goblins and Other Fauna of the Burmese Buddhist Landscape,” Patrick Pranke, University of Louisville
Dr. Pranke holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan. Currently he serves as an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Louisville. His specialization is Burmese Buddhism and Burmese popular cults, which he has conducted extensive research on over several years in the Sagaing Hills in Upper Burma. In addition to his experience in Burma, Dr. Pranke has been a teacher and administrator on the University of Wisconsin’s College Year in India Program and Antioch College’s Buddhist Studies Program in north India. Dr. Pranke also maintains a strong academic interest in Hindu folk traditions.

Film: “Friends in High Places”
By Lindsey Merrison (2001)
Whether contending with a deceitful daughter-in-law, forecasting financial prospects for a tea shop, or freeing a husband from government detainment, Friends in High Places reveals the central role of Buddhist nats and spirit mediums in alleviating the day to day burdens of modern Burmese life. “Leprosy isn’t as contagious as people’s problems,” notes one medium, “my clients bring their worries into my home. I don’t need to go out on the street to learn how cruel life can be.” Yet despite their skills in channeling good luck for others, the life stories of the mediums prove to be as poignant as the stories of those who seek their assistance. Just as nats lie somewhere on the spectrum between mortals and the divine, the gay men who serve as primary conduits for the nat spirits are considered to be neither male nor female. Regarded by society with a curious mix of disdain and reverence, the male mediums profiled in this film – ranging from the gentle, melancholy “Lady Silver Wings” to the hard drinking, ego-driven “Mr. Famous” – illustrate the special niche granted to gay men in Burmese society. Exquisite footage accentuates Lindsey Merrison’s keen eye for nuance as she takes the viewer on a journey examining the extremes that define Burmese spirit mediums and their way of life. Deceit and artistry, tragedy and comedy, faith and cynicism – in a country known both as a 2,500 year bastion of Buddhism and more recently for its legacy of political corruption and instability, the world of the nat becomes an analogy for the many unusual juxtapositions within Burma itself.

Description

Students who would like to practice their spoken Korean can engage with students who speak Korean as their native language to improve their fluency and confidence. All students are welcome.

Description

This two-campus series will feature ethnographic films by young Tibetans from within China and young Burmese filmmakers, a lecture and film on Buddhism in Burma, and a workshop on documentary film and development in Asia. Interesting similarities between Burmese and Tibetan cultures – both of which flourish in strongly Buddhist, intellectually rich yet economically poor communities living within difficult political boundaries – make this cross-cultural comparison especially compelling. The weekend will feature works of emerging and established Tibetan filmmakers, most of which have never been shown outside China, Burmese students participating in the Yangon Film School, and established Anglo-Burman filmmaker Lindsey Merrison. Films will be followed by discussions with invited Toronto filmmakers. Discussions will also focus on the special value of participatory film projects for young people living in threatened cultural groups. The event venues will be enhanced by a stunning exhibit of images by Plateau Photographers, a participatory photography project that trains minority students in western China.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 12:00 noon-4:00 pm
Venue: Jackman Humanities Building, Room 100

NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING IN TIBET

12-12:45
Introduction by Frances Garrett
Lecture: “New Film in Tibet,” Françoise Robin
A lecture discussing the recent boom in documentary films being produced in Tibetan regions of China by Dr. Françoise Robin, a scholar of Tibetan contemporary literature and film. In 2003, Françoise Robin completed a doctoral thesis on Tibetan literature at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris, titled “La littérature de fiction d’expression tibétaine au Tibet (RPC) depuis 1950 : sources textuelles anciennes, courants principaux et fonctions dans la société contemporaine tibétaine.” Dr. Robin is a maître de conférence at INALCO. She publishes widely on Tibetan literature and is currently doing research on Tibetan film.

12:45-3:00: Short films by emerging talent from inside China
Film: “Stone Scripture,” Directed by Dondrup Dorje (Tibetan film student)
Response and discussion with 2 Toronto documentary filmmakers

2:00-3:00
Film: “TBA,” Directed by Otto Wendekar (Tibetan film student)
Response and discussion with 2 Toronto documentary filmmakers

3-3:15 Break

3:15-4:30 “Tantric Yogi”
Film: “Tantric Yogi,” Directed by Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang (50 mins)
Response and discussion with 2 Toronto documentary filmmakers
Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang (aka Jangbu) is considered by many Tibet’s greatest living poet. Born in Qinghai province, China, he worked for many years as editor of the Tibetan language literary journal Bod kyi rtsom rig sgyu rtsal [Tibetan art and literature] in Lhasa. In recent years he has been a Visiting Professor of Tibetan Language at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. He has directed the documentaries Tantric Yogi, and Ani Lacham: A Tibetan Nun. He is currently working on a series of documentaries that reflect on social and cultural issues in modern Tibet. The first English translation of his poems and short stories, an anthology of his works titled The Nine-Eyed Agathe, will be soon published in the United States. In Tibetan with English subtitles, Tantric Yogi follows a Yogi and his fellow villagers as they travel through challenging territory to reach a rare gathering of thousands of lay tantric practitioners in Eastern Tibet. Narrated by Jim Broadbent.

4:30-6:00 “Summer Pasture”
Film: “Summer Pasture” Directed by Tsering Perlo, Lynn True and Nelson Walker
Response and discussion with 2 Toronto documentary filmmakers
Tsering Perlo founded Rabsal, a local Tibetan NGO that engages Tibetans in filmmaking to preserve and regenerate Tibetan culture and customs. He lives in Dzachukha (Shiqu) County, Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and graduated from the Sichuan Province Tibetan School (SPTI). Perlo has worked with numerous organizations, including the Tibet Fund, The Bridge Fund and the Tibetan & Himalayan Library at the University of Virginia. Perlo is the first recipient of the Machik Fellowship, a program designed to support dynamic Tibetan change-makers working to strengthen their communities and environments. Summer Pasture, his first film, is a feature-length documentary that chronicles one summer with a young family amidst this period of great uncertainty. Locho, his wife Yama, and their infant daughter, nicknamed Jiatomah (“pale chubby girl”), spend the summer months in eastern Tibet’s Zachukha grasslands, an area known as Wu-Zui or “5-Most,” the highest, coldest, poorest, largest, and most remote county in Sichuan Province, China. Summer Pasture takes place at a critical time in Locho and Yama’s lives, as they question their future as nomads. With their pastoral traditions confronting rapid modernization, Locho and Yama must reconcile the challenges that threaten to drastically reshape their existence.

Description

This two-campus series will feature ethnographic films by young Tibetans from within China and young Burmese filmmakers, a lecture and film on Buddhism in Burma, and a workshop on documentary film and development in Asia. Interesting similarities between Burmese and Tibetan cultures – both of which flourish in strongly Buddhist, intellectually rich yet economically poor communities living within difficult political boundaries – make this cross-cultural comparison especially compelling. The weekend will feature works of emerging and established Tibetan filmmakers, most of which have never been shown outside China, Burmese students participating in the Yangon Film School, and established Anglo-Burman filmmaker Lindsey Merrison. Films will be followed by discussions with invited Toronto filmmakers. Discussions will also focus on the special value of participatory film projects for young people living in threatened cultural groups. The event venues will be enhanced by a stunning exhibit of images by Plateau Photographers, a participatory photography project that trains minority students in western China.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Venue: Innis Town Hall

Film: “Ani Lhacham”
By Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang (China 2007, 27 min, Tibetan with English subtitles)

When she was a child, Lhacham was eager to learn how to read and write. For economic reasons, her parents thought otherwise. She decided to run away to a nunnery in order to receive the education she was dreaming of. Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang follows her during a trip to the nearby town to get her tape recorder fixed. This recorder is her knowledge tool which she uses to learn Tibetan. The film is a tender and poetic portrait of Lhacham’s first journey into town.

Film: “The Art of Documentary Filmmaking”
By Lindsey Merrison (color, 120 min, 2005, DVD or 16mm)

At the end of 2005, Anglo-Burmese filmmaker Lindsey Merrison brought together eight tutors well-versed in documentary from Europe and Australia with twelve young Burmese men and women for a three-week workshop entitled “The Art of Documentary Filmmaking.” The venue was a quiet hotel in Myanmar’s capital, Yangon. The Burmese participants had little or no prior knowledge of filming stories from real life. A task that would have been daunting in any country posed a particular challenge in autocratic Myanmar, where documenting reality is a risky undertaking for those on both sides of the camera. All the more remarkable then, that, 21 days later, the participants on this residential course had learned how to handle the equipment, grappled with the artistic and ethical aspects of the genre, and researched, wrote, and filmed four short documentary portraits inspired by the subject of “Women in Myanmar.” The greatest achievement of the event could well have been the impetus and direction it gave to these budding filmmakers, all of whom are already developing new projects. The film features the four final films made by the participants. It also includes the participants’ first film exercise and a video diary chronicling the workshop itself. Together, these works provide a vibrant record of a surprisingly rewarding encounter.

Discussion with filmmakers

Description

This two-campus series will feature ethnographic films by young Tibetans from within China and young Burmese filmmakers, a lecture and film on Buddhism in Burma, and a workshop on documentary film and development in Asia. Interesting similarities between Burmese and Tibetan cultures – both of which flourish in strongly Buddhist, intellectually rich yet economically poor communities living within difficult political boundaries – make this cross-cultural comparison especially compelling. The weekend will feature works of emerging and established Tibetan filmmakers, most of which have never been shown outside China, Burmese students participating in the Yangon Film School, and established Anglo-Burman filmmaker Lindsey Merrison. Films will be followed by discussions with invited Toronto filmmakers. Discussions will also focus on the special value of participatory film projects for young people living in threatened cultural groups. The event venues will be enhanced by a stunning exhibit of images by Plateau Photographers, a participatory photography project that trains minority students in western China.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 12:00 noon-5:00 pm
Venue: TBA

WORKSHOPS ON DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING

A series of workshops on documentary filmmaking, bringing together several Toronto professional documentary filmmakers with the visiting Asian filmmakers, to discuss various practical issues relevant to documentary filmmaking. Leslie Chan’s New Media for Development program students may also attend, as well as selected other students.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Dan (Danny) Breznitz is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and The College of Management, and is an Associate Professor by courtesy at the School of Public Policy. He finished his PhD at MIT. Breznitz has extensive experience in conducting comparative in-depth research of Rapid-Innovation-Based Industries and their globalization. Dr. Breznitz’s first book, Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland (Yale University Press), won the 2008 Don K. Price for best book on Science and Technology given by APSA and was a finalist for the 2007 best book of the year award in political science by ForeWord Magazine. His second book (co-authored with Michael Murphree) The Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China has just been published by Yale University Press. In addition, his work was published in various journals and edited volumes. Breznitz is one of five young North American scholars to be selected as a 2008 Industry Study Fellow of the Sloan Foundation. Breznitz has also been an advisor on Science Technology and Innovation Policies for multinational corporations, international organizations such as the World Bank, and local and national governments in the US, Asia, and Europe.

During 2006 Breznitz was a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and during 2007 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Bruegel Institute for International Economics, Brussels. His work is sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, the Samuel Neaman Institute for Advance Studies, the Bi-National Science Foundation (US Israel), the NSF, Georgia Research Alliance, the Enterprise Innovation Institute, and The Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P). Breznitz is the co-director with John Zysman of UC Berkeley of a collaborative study titled “Can Wealthy Nations Stay Rich in a Rapidly Changing Global Economy?” A former founder and CEO of a small software company, Breznitz is also a research affiliate of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center. In addition, he is a senior researcher of the Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy Program (STIP), the Academic Director of the Technology Cluster Initiative — http://techclusters.ei2.org — and the director of the Globalization, Innovation, and Development program at the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP).

Description

In the past 10 years, qualitative research has become an increasing “fad” in China, for its flexible design, its awareness of reflexivity of the researcher and inter-subjectivity in producing research findings, its advantage of searching for the meaning-making of the researched, and, above all, its attention to the voices of the disadvantaged groups in society. Inspiring as it is, we, as university researchers, have encountered many challenges in doing this kind of research in Chinese schools. As we attempt to find out the “truth” of teachers’ practice, they are more interested in finding out what needs to be improved from us. As we try to keep certain distance from the teachers so as to obtain enough “space” for the research, some of them show signs of getting really “close” for emotional support. We are constantly struggling between rigor and relevance, objectivity and subjectivity, as well as outer comfort and inner peace, for the validity check and ethical concerns in our research. In this presentatioProfessor Chen will introduce some of the dilemmas faced, strategies used in dealing with them, as well as cultural, social, political and research paradigmatic implications for this kind of phenomenon. Since these dilemmas are so complex and complicated, some are considered insurmountable and needing further reflection by, imagination from, and collaboration among all parties concerned.
—
Xiangming CHEN is professor of education and director of Center for Basic Education and Teacher Education at Graduate School of Education, Peking University, China. She obtained Bachelor of Arts degree in Hunan Normal University in 1982, Master of Arts degree from Beijing Normal University in 1987, and Master of Education and Ed. D. from Harvard University in 1989 and 1994 respectively. Since 1970, she has worked as factory worker, primary and secondary school teacher, and university professor at different periods of her life. Prof. Chen’s major research areas include qualitative research methodology, teacher education, curriculum development, as well as learning and teaching. She has been team leader for more than 15 national and international research projects on education, especially basic education for poor rural areas in China. She has also worked as national consultant for many international organizations such as the World Bank, UNDP, and UK DFID. One of her major projects is participatory teacher training for the new basic education curriculum reform, which has made great impact on teacher training in China. She has also been leading an university-school collaborative research project on teachers’ practical knowledge, as the theoretical foundation for teacher professional development. By now, Prof. Chen has published 10 books (including editing) and over 100 articles on education and research methodology. Prof. Chen has been teaching courses on qualitative research methods, teacher education, curriculum development and instruction for graduate students in Peking University and many other higher learning institutions as guest lecturer. She was rewarded the 1st Class Prize on Teaching in 2001 and Excellent Teacher in 2009 by the Beijing Municipal government. In addition, Prof. Chen is serving on many committees, as adjunct professor of quite a few universities, and as member of the Standing Committee of Chinese Educational Association as well as many journals.

Description

An informal reception follows the lecture.

This paper looks at the relationship between two of the most important archives of public modernity in India, law and cinema. Questions of legality and justice have always had a pervasive presence in Hindi cinema, and cinema has served almost as the juridical unconscious. This paper asks the question about why the courtroom emerges as such as an important space in Hindi films in the fifties, and how questions of love and justice are constantly intertwined in this period. Using Raj Kapoor’s Awara as an iconic example the paper argues for a way of reading Awara as an important constitutional text that exists in the shadows of legal history.

Lawrence Liang is a lawyer and founder of the Alternative Law Forum. ALF is a collective of lawyers working on various aspects of law, legality and power. He works on the intersection of law and cultural politics. His work on Intellectual Property looks at how the digital turn has accelerated conflicts over questions of authorship, ownership and circulation in the cultural domain. His interest in free software and media piracy led him to looking at how these practices define contemporary culture. Liang has been involved in a number of anti censorship cases and campaigns in india. He has also written on law and aesthetics. Currently finishing a book on Law, Justice and Cinema in India, Liang has also shown as an artist in Manifesta, and in collaboration with CAMP and OXDB is one of the initiators of PAD.MA (Public Access Digital Media Archive). He has most recently been involved with the Law and Social Sciences Network (‘Lassnet’). He is the author of two monographs and several articles in journals and books.

Description

Screening and Public Q&A

“From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s” is a documentary film about the development of contemporary art in Southern China in the 1980s. Though the 1980s was a seminal period in the history of contemporary art in China, the contribution and experimentalism of the art scene in South China, particularly in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, have thus far been overlooked. Based on primary research, rare footage and personal interviews with key artists, this documentary film bears witness not only to the “Reading Fever” that gripped the Chinese art world in the 1980s, but also to the influx of popular culture such as Canto pop that flooded over the border to Guangdong from Hong Kong at the end of the Cultural Revolution. From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng highlights the experimentalism and vitality of artists, critics, and curators in South China during this time, including Hou Hanru, Wang Huangsheng, Chen Tong, Yang Jiechang, Wang Du, and members of the Big Tailed Elephant Group, including Chen Shaoxiong, Lin Yilin and Xu Tan, whose contributions to the development of contemporary art have been long lasting and deep.

This film forms part of a major research and website project entitled Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990. All materials collected in conjunction with this project, which was launched in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York in the fall of 2010, are publicly accessible at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. A portion of these materials is also available on Asia Art Archive’s dedicated website www.china1980s.org .

Dr. Jane DeBevoise is an independent advisor and art historian, based in Hong Kong and New York. Prior to moving to Hong Kong, Dr. DeBevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum (1996-2002), responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She is now the Chair of the Board of Directors of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and a Trustee of Asian Cultural Council and The China Institute in New York.

Description

This roundtable discussion follows the Toronto debut screening

1:00 – 3:00 pm
“From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Cantonese Contemporary Art in the 1980s”

University of Toronto Art Center
15 Kings College Circle

“From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s” is a documentary film about the development of contemporary art in Southern China in the 1980s. Though the 1980s was a seminal period in the history of contemporary art in China, the contribution and experimentalism of the art scene in South China, particularly in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, have thus far been overlooked. Based on primary research, rare footage and personal interviews with key artists, this documentary film bears witness not only to the “Reading Fever” that gripped the Chinese art world in the 1980s, but also to the influx of popular culture such as Canto pop that flooded over the border to Guangdong from Hong Kong at the end of the Cultural Revolution. From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng highlights the experimentalism and vitality of artists, critics, and curators in South China during this time, including Hou Hanru, Wang Huangsheng, Chen Tong, Yang Jiechang, Wang Du, and members of the Big Tailed Elephant Group, including Chen Shaoxiong, Lin Yilin and Xu Tan, whose contributions to the development of contemporary art have been long lasting and deep.

This film forms part of a major research and website project entitled Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990. All materials collected in conjunction with this project, which was launched in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York in the fall of 2010, are publicly accessible at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. A portion of these materials is also available on Asia Art Archive’s dedicated website www.china1980s.org .

Dr. Jane DeBevoise is an independent advisor and art historian, based in Hong Kong and New York. Prior to moving to Hong Kong, Dr. DeBevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum (1996-2002), responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She is now the Chair of the Board of Directors of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and a Trustee of Asian Cultural Council and The China Institute in New York.

Description

The establishment of NHI in 1995 was a milestone in Taiwan’s history of public health. However, over the past 15 years, Taiwan’s NHI has been surrounded with deficit-related controversies. By bringing the analysis of production back in, I will provide a political-economic analysis of Taiwan’s NHI. I will argue that, under the logic of capital accumulation and expansion, the commodified and marketized medical industry is the culprit of the perpetual NHI deficit problem.

The medicalization, commodification, marketization, and corporatization of the public health system are part of the many social problems plaguing Taiwan. A group of intellectuals in the field of public health and medicine has been promoting a transformative grassroots movement to resolve fundamental public health problems. This movement is fully based on critical public health research. The author, using this current NHI research as an example, will analyze how this grassroots movement has been initiated and promoted.

Bio:
Meei-shia Chen is Professor, Department of Public Health, National Cheng Kung University and President, Taiwan Association for Promoting Public Health. She was associate professor of health policy at the University of Chicago 1990-1996. Her research interests include political economy of health policy, health care reform, health inequalities, and workers’ health.

Description

Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir has remained a flashpoint in South Asia during past over 21 years. An armed rebellion, which broke out in 1989 led to destabilization in region which thousands of people getting killed and displaced. India used its military might to contain the conflict but the real political issue remains unresolved. Since Kashmir dispute is centre to acrimonious relationship between India and Pakistan, both the countries have tried many agreements, but have failed to bring peace to the region. With both pro-India and pro-secessionist parties claiming to represent people of Jammu and Kashmir, there is no forward movement on political settlement. The result is that Kashmir is writhing in pain and agony. Past three years have seen a different uprising, which many believe, is a transition from violence to non-violence but there seems to be no capitalization on that account. The stalemate has left people in despair and sustainable peace remains elusive.

Shujaat Bukhari is a senior journalist and writer based in Srinagar, the capital of Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir. He has covered Kashmir conflict for the last 21 years and has reported on politics, culture and defense issues. He has worked with several regional, national and international newspapers and has carved a niche for himself. Besides being a journalist he has special interest in promoting culture and his native language—Kashmiri. He has survived four assassination attempts during his chequered career but has stayed back in his home place.

Description

6:30-8:30 Opening remarks by Senator Vivienne Poy (Chancellor Emerita, University of Toronto); Lecture by Ryan Pyle (Award winning documentary photographer based in Beijing) and Q&A

8:30-9:30 Informal reception

Ryan Pyle is an award winning documentary photographer who has spent the last ten years of his life visually documenting life in China for the world’s leading magazines and newspapers. While living in Shanghai, and documenting China has proved an amazing experience for Ryan, there was always a need for a bigger adventure. So when Ryan’s brother, Colin, recently quit his “Bay Street” job, and sold his house, the two brothers decided that something truly epic needed to be attempted. Together these brothers from Toronto decided that they were going to circumnavigate China on their BMW F800GS motorcycles. And that’s exactly what they set out to do.

On October 17th 2010, Colin and Ryan safely returned to Shanghai, on what was the first complete circumnavigation of China by motorcycle ever completed. The journey took the brothers 18,000km in just 65 days and exposed them to: dangerous flooding along the border of China and North Korea, military interference along the border of China and Mongolia, and sub-freezing temperatures and a hail storm at 5200m above sea level on the border of China and Pakistan. Not to mention the altitude sickness and mechanical failure that added to their adventure on the high plateau in rural Tibet. This was a journey and an adventure without precedent. During their entire odyssey around China, Colin and Ryan filmed daily using motorcycle mounted cameras, helmet mounted cameras and an HD Camera operated by a camera man who followed them; so that they could capture their once-in-a-lifetime experience on film. Colin and Ryan have named their project: “The Middle Kingdom Ride” and are currently in the process of publishing a book about their adventures as well as a documentary film. For more information you can visit: www.mkride.com.

We, at the Asian Institute, are pleased to announce that on April 15th Ryan Pyle, a University of Toronto graduate and AI Affiliate Member, will join us to discuss his photography career, his motorcycle expedition, and the challenges of film making in “The Middle Kingdom”. Samples of his photography and video clips from his motorcycle film will be included in his lecture. Ryan rarely makes it back to Toronto and we are excited about this opportunity to share his work and experiences with a wider audience.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

The emigrant communities of southeast coastal China maintained strong connections with sojourning Chinese, and local events rarely remained exclusively local for long. Events had repercussions that rippled back and forth across the seas, illustrating the intimately shared historical experiences of people living within a vast maritime space. This presentation will explore the transnational effects of General Fang Yao’s campaign of village pacification in Chaozhou prefecture (Eastern Guangdong) from 1869 to 1891. General Fang was officially charged with ridding this unruly region of its powerful criminal underworld and rebellious brotherhood organizations; collecting unpaid taxes; and imposing a militarized social order. His violent campaign of rural pacification not only transformed the social landscape of coastal Chaozhou, it had a significant impact on Shanghai and the British Straits Settlements. The campaign also advanced the interests of Chaozhou’s sojourning commercial elites as they struggled for dominance in the South China Seas region.

Melissa Macauley (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1993) is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1998) and various articles and book chapters on Chinese social history, the port culture and transnational history of southeast coastal China, and the transformation of non-Western law in the age of colonialism and imperialism. She is currently completing a book titled Chaozhou Sojourners: Crime and Migration in the South China Seas, 1662-1937.