Description

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

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

Schedule

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

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Description

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

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

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

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

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

Description

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

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

Description

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

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

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

Description

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

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

Description

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

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

Description

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

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

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

3 PM – 5 PM Lecture, reception follows

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