Description

Haejoang Cho will be speaking as a ‘native anthropologist’ about her whirlwind journey experiencing South Korea’s compressed modernity since the 1980’s. The discussion begins with the recent 4/16 Sewol Ferry Disaster in Jindo, that has resonated with 9/11 and the 3/11 Disaster in Fukushima. Professor Cho will focus on the split of South Korean public responses into disparate antagonistic groups; those who say to “never forget”, and those who urge to “forget and go back to normal life”, The discussion will elaborate on concepts of ‘risk society’ and ‘reflexivity’ and ‘mourning’ and ‘violence’ in its analysis of compressed modernity and global capitalism as the lived experiences of people in South Korea.

Haejoang Cho is cultural anthropologist in training and feminist in faith. She is a professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) which is an alternative educational and cultural studio for the teenagers since 1999. The Haja project has been launched as a part of ‘action research’ of solving the problems of youth from the perspectives of feminism, cultural studies and ecological studies in the rapidly globalizing East Asian context.

Description

This lecture will focus on the precarious youth at the Haja Center (the Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) and their survival politics based on Professor Haejoang Cho’s pedagogical and socio-political experiments. In the rapidly globalizing East Asian context, the project has evolved responding proactively to national and global crises; the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2008-2009 global financial crises, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Interested in a pedagogy that connects life and learning, Cho has endeavored to create platforms that enable new types of learning in various forms including a youth center, an alternative school, an after-school community, and a transition town. This discussion will explain the launching of these platforms and the discussion of anticipated new projects. As Ulrich Beck termed as “emancipatory catastrophism”, the power of transformation is coming from a keen awareness of recent economic, social, and natural crises. It is unprecedented, fundamental, and globally shared, rather than as isolated and unique. Hence, the youths would be able to bring their experiences and observation of crises into an “epochal transformation” of learning through actively connecting platforms of various kinds, creatively turning their connections into a new one.

Haejoang Cho is cultural anthropologist in training and feminist in faith. She is a professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) which is an alternative educational and cultural studio for the teenagers since 1999. The Haja project has been launched as a part of ‘action research’ of solving the problems of youth from the perspectives of feminism, cultural studies and ecological studies in the rapidly globalizing East Asian context.

3PM – 5PM – Lecutre
5PM – 6PM – Informal Reception

Description

The focus of this talk is a rather strange relationship between rice, water management infrastructure and farmers in the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand. Floating rice is a type of rice that has the ability to grow its stem rapidly, keeping pace with the rise of the floodwater. Since the 1970s, the role of floating rice in water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya Delta has increasingly attracted attention from government officials, area studies scholars and hydrologists. Morita will argue that this particular interspecies relation facilitates a reconsideration of the notion of infrastructure and its relationship with nature. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain largely invisible to the actors that rely on them. However, unusual events such as breakdowns and accidents bring about what STS scholars have denoted “infrastructural inversion”, in which the workings of infrastructure become highly visible to people. In moments of infrastructural inversion, it has often become apparent that the water management infrastructure of the Chao Phraya Delta is entangled with floating rice cultivation. By following the travels of people, ideas and technologies, this talk traces how the concerned parties have delineated this multispecies infrastructure in moments of infrastructural inversion in partly overlapping and partly divergent ways. At the core of this multispecies infrastructure is an involutionary relation between farmers and rice species. In this relationship the care of farmers and the unpredictable variation of rice create a condition for the development and constant variation of divergent but mutually dependent ways of life in the watery environment of the delta.

Atsuro Morita teaches anthropology at Osaka University. He has done ethnographic research on technology development in Thailand focusing on how ideas, artifacts and people travel in and out Thailand. In his recent research on Environmental Infrastructures (funded by Japan Society for Promotion of Science), he studies the co-existence of heterogeneous components–including cosmological, scientific and multispecies ones–of water management infrastructures in the Chao Phraya Delta. The Environmental Infrastructures project (http://eiam.hus.osaka-u.ac.jp) is an international project based on collaboration between Japanese and Danish scholars, among others. The project is focusing on the intersections of a variety of practices in the making of infrastructures for knowing and managing environmental change.

Description

This inaugural event, the first of its kind in North America, brings together academics, artists, activists, and frontline community members as they examine and discuss the experiences of queer Filipinos/as in Canada. Through a series of connected and provocative events, this gathering aims to initiate rich dialogue between multiple stakeholders around the contributions and needs of queer Filipinos/as as a diasporic community with links within and beyond Canada.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
This conference places emerging and established scholars in Filipino, Asian North American and Queer Studies in conversation with artists, front-line community workers, and community members. Participants will address specific concerns and topics that are relevant to LGBTQ Filipinos/as in Canada, and will attempt to intervene in dialogues around policy, integration, and settlement.

CONFERENCE
JANUARY 23, 2105. 9 am – 7 pm
100 McCaul St., Room 190

OPENING RECEPTION
JANUARY 23, 2015. 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Open Gallery, 49 McCaul St.

ART EXHIBIT: VISUALIZING THE INTIMATE
JANUARY 23 –FEBRUARY 15, 2015.
M-F, 9am-5pm
Open Gallery, 49 McCaul St.

Click the link below for more information about the event.

Description

This presentation investigates The Arrival of Yoshitsune/Camp at Kisegawa (1940-41) produced by the Japanese-style painter Yasuda Yukihiko. It demonstrates that the painting, which emulates Kamakura-period paintings, depicts medieval warriors, and was displayed at an exhibition that celebrated Japan’s imperial family, significantly contributed to the politicized cultural discourse that espoused the theme of “return to Japan” (Nihon kaiki), which was central to Japan’s wartime ideology. The painting, Asato Ikeda will reveal, clearly drew on pre-modern Japanese pictorial art but it was simultaneously inspired by the modern aesthetics of post-expressionist machine paintings, and thus mirrors the fundamental contradiction of the wartime Japanese state that repudiated some aspects of modernity upon which it was nevertheless predicated. Following recent fascism studies that understand fascism in relation to a paradoxical attitude toward modernity, Asato Ikeda will suggest that Yasuda’s work not only exemplified the Japanese state’s appropriation of modernism, but can also be considered as a Japanese example of fascist modernism.

Asato Ikeda is Assistant Professor of Art History and Music at Fordham University, New York and an Asia-Pacific Journal contributing editor. Between 2014 and 2016, she is the Bishop White Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where she plans to organize an exhibition about wakashu (male youth). Co-editor, with Ming Tiampo and Aya Louisa McDonald, of Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), she is currently working on a monograph that will explore the relationship between Japanese art and war in the 1930s and early 1940s.