On Tuesday, February 28, 2023, at 5p.m. PT, the UW Taiwan Studies Program will welcome Professor Wei-Ping Lin to discuss her newly published work, Island Fantasia: Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between China and Taiwan. This is a virtual event which will be livestreamed on our Facebook and YouTube pages. Click here to register.
The Matsu archipelago between China and Taiwan, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, was suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist–Nationalist conflict. The army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people were confronted with the question of how to move forward. Professor Lin’s in-depth ethnography and social history of the islands focuses on how individual citizens redefined themselves and reimagined their society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Lin shows how islanders used both traditional and new media to cope with the conflicts and trauma of harsh military rule. She discusses the formation of new social imaginaries through the appearance of “imagining subjects,” interrogating their subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies as they seek to answer existential questions.
Talk by Realisa Masardi, Universitas Gadjah Mada and University of Michigan
For more than two decades, Indonesia has been a transit spot for asylum seekers from Central Asia, South Asia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia while irregularly en route to Australia. Following Australia’s controversial ‘stop the boats’ policy, thousands of refugees, including the young population, must wait longer in Indonesia to get their refugee status processed by UNHCR and to have a chance to resettle in a third country. As a non-signatory state to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Indonesia has a limited legal framework to protect the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, which causes grave precarious conditions for them. Nevertheless, arbitrariness in Indonesia’s legal framework and its flexibility in handling refugees surprisingly has provided a certain level of “informal protection” and opportunities for young refugees to make maneuvers in the fluid arenas. As they wait, the young people also plan, anticipate, negotiate, hustle, play, and rest. This talk will focus on the dynamics of refugee youths’ agency-in-waiting. Professor Masardi explores how young refugees exercise passive and active waiting and what contributing factors catalyze or impede the distribution of their agency.
Realisa D Masardi is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. She is the awardee of the prestigious 2022 Gosling-Lim Postdoctoral Fellowship in Southeast Asian Studies. Currently, Professor Masardi is completing her postdoc program at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Professor Masardi has been working on the issues of children and young people in several migrants/refugees communities in Southeast Asia, focusing on their identities, access to rights, and agency, particularly on their everyday survival movements. She received her PhD in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her dissertation focuses on the social navigation of independent young refugees from diverse countries facing precarities during transit in Indonesia.
This roundtable is part of the “Boundary Pushing in Asian Studies” workshop organized by the editors of the Journal of Asian Studies in partnership with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Editors of leading journals — Tina Chen (Verge: Studies in Global Asias), Suzy Kim (positions: asia critique), Sumit Guha (Modern Asian Studies), Paolo Sartori (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), Hyung Gu Lynn (Pacific Affairs), and Andrea Jain (Journal of the American Academy of Religion) — will join Joseph Alter, Purnima Dhavan, Kelly Anne Hammond, Kate McDonald, and Albert Park (Journal of Asian Studies). Each editor will talk briefly about their experience highlighting things that are especially important for early career scholars to know and understand about the peer review process. This will be followed by Q&A with participants in the workshop. Registration is free and the roundtable is open to the public.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent ripples across the international community. Join the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, China Studies Program, and Taiwan Studies Program in-person and online on Tuesday, November 15, from 7-8:30 p.m. PT for a discussion of how the war in Europe is affecting the increasingly tense situation in the Taiwan Strait.
Mechademia—an intellectual community built around a conference and a journal (University of Minnesota Press)—has stood at the forefront of youth-focused Asian popular culture scholarship since its inception in the early 2000s. With its emphasis upon manga, anime, video games, and other forms of East Asian popular culture and their fan bases, Mechademia has regularly brought together scholars, fans, and practitioners in seeking common dialogue, fresh approaches, and innovative insights.
This Digital Dialogues session seeks to probe the interconnections between Mechademia and Asian Studies. We begin with a brief history of Mechademia led by its founding organizers discussing the impetus for creating the conference and journal. The discussion subsequently broadens to address the following questions:
- What is the place of popular culture studies in the larger field of Asian Studies? What can popular culture studies contribute to Asian Studies (and vice versa)?
- How do fan cultures contribute to our understandings and interactions in Asian Studies?
- What roles do race, gender, class, nation, and other structuring properties play in the study of fan cultures, with a particular eye to Asian Studies?
- How might querying popular culture studies help queer Asian Studies?
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The conference has three panel discussions: a) judicial independence: judges roundtable discussion; b) civil society, media, and judicial independence c) judicial independence in developing democracies: works in progress.
This may be of interest to those focusing on East and South Asia, law, and politics. They can register their interest at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/judicial-independence-in-developing-democracies-tickets-395803778757
U.S. CULCON is pleased to invite you to a webinar, “Neglected Crossroads: Black Lives in the Japanese Experience/Japanese Lives in the Black Experience” Wednesday, September 28, 9:00-10:00 ET/22:00-23:00 JT. Japanese language interpretation will be provided.
This discussion explores the intersections of Japanese and Black, primarily African American, lives, their historical context and social impact, as well as the expanding and ambivalent role the internet plays in their presentation, reappraisal, and redefinition as both societies grapple with the challenges of diversity in the age of social media.
This program focusing on DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) in the U.S.-Japan partnership is funded by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Registration is required. Please register to join us by Tuesday, September 20 by going to:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEude-hpjwqHdEgOA9xxNBrj3e59ga2N3Eb
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
This AAS Digital Dialogue session will be an opportunity to meet with Joseph S. Alter, the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, to learn about the preparation of manuscripts for submission and the peer review process. Alter will begin the session with a brief overview of points that are outlined in a short document entitled “Guidelines for Publishing in the Journal of Asian Studies,” which you may access below. The document is designed to address many common questions that relate to publishing and to highlight key points that are especially relevant as you consider submitting your work to the JAS.
Following this overview, the session will be structured around questions you are invited to submit in advance (you may submit questions when registering for the session, or through the button below). These may range from the practical and procedural to broader concerns about how the field of Asian Studies is changing, and how to conceptualize your work in relation to changes in academia more broadly.
