Events and Highlights
Other UCLA Events
May 2, 2024 | 3:00 PM PDT
China Without Coasts
In the traditional historiography about China as a regionalism, mountains and rivers appear central, but less often do coasts. Instead, the coasts are generally invisible, lost to landlessness, lawlessness, and foreign exploitation. This conceptualization not only erases coastal knowledge and experiences, but also displaces the energies of water frontiers, borderlands, and diasporas as “external” or “overseas.” Troubling these biases, this talk brings attention to the intercoastal Nanyang, a history of the south seas scattered across different archives in China and beyond. It will discuss two broad phenomena, a north-south trade based in Hong Kong and Chinese sailors working on steamships, to argue that a China without coasts is to deny continuums, interfaces, and ambiguities as a basis to write history. Speaker: Shelly Chan, historian of transnational and modern China and associate professor at UC Santa Cruz. Sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies.
May 2, 2024 | 5:00 PM PDT
Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History
Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History is a poignant memoir by journalist Margaret Juhae Lee, who sets out on a search for her family’s history lost to the darkness of Korea’s colonial decades, and contends with the shockwaves of violence that followed them over four generations and across continents. Combining investigative journalism, oral history, and archival research, Margaret reveals the truth about the grandfather she never knew. What she found is that Lee Chul Ha, her grandfather who left her grandmother and two young sons in 1936, was not a source of shame; he was a student revolutionary imprisoned in 1929 for protesting the Japanese government’s colonization of Korea. He was a hero—and eventually honored as a Patriot of South Korea almost 60 years after his death. But reclaiming her grandfather’s legacy, in the end, isn’t what Margaret finds the most valuable. It is through the series of three long-form interviews with her grandmother that Margaret finally finds a sense of recognition she’s been missing her entire life. A story of healing old wounds and the reputation of an extraordinary young man, Starry Field bridges the tales of two women, generations and oceans apart, who share the desire to build family in someplace called home. Sponsored by the Center for Korean Studies, the Asian American Studies Department, the Asian American Studies Center, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and CSW|Barbra Streisand Center.
May 6, 2024 | 2:30 PM PDT
Migration, Street Vending and Social Protection: Insights and Ongoing Reflections from Argentina, Spain, and the United States
Street vending represents a hyper-visible and challenging phenomenon in many global cities, underpinning urban conflict and public debates around its criminalization, tolerance, and legalization. Facing different forms of discrimination, migrant street vendors self-organize to access social and legal protection, with their movements gaining growing political influence. This presentation builds on an ongoing reflection on representations, policies, and practices shaping street vending by confronting different ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2015 in Argentina, Spain, and the United States with Haitian, Senegalese, and Latin American vendors. The presentation underlines the multiple strategies migrant street vendors use to mobilize, obtain support from local community organizations, and adapt narratives and repertoires of action. Speaker: Félicien De Heusch, LAI Visiting Scholar and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Sponsored by the Latin American Institute and International Migration Studies.
May 14, 2024 | 11:00 AM PDT
Yaks and Biodiversity: Contested Narratives of Land Degradation in Eastern Tibet (Research Talk)
Land degradation in Dzorge County, Sichuan Province, on the eastern Tibetan Plateau is perceived as a significant problem by both the regional government and indigenous Tibetan pastoralists. Multiple large-scale efforts to restore the grassland have been undertaken by the county’s Animal Husbandry Bureau since 2010, while concurrent, smaller-scale efforts using very different techniques have been led by local Tibetan pastoralists. Although government officials and local pastoralists share concerns regarding the detrimental effects of land degradation, especially desertification, their views on and values of land diverge, as do their understandings of the causes of land degradation. Drawing on a case study of a community-led land restoration project in Dzorge, this talk details the emergent and innovative forms of land restoration efforts that center land-based community building as a precondition to environmental protection. In doing so, the paper presents a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to community efforts to build habitable dwelling places, may offer us opportunities to answer ‘what makes a good life” in the midst of political and environmental catastrophes today. Speaker: Huatse Gyal, assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Sponsored by the Program on Central Asia.
May 14, 2024 | 4:00 PM PDT
Chips War? Global Production Networks and Geopolitics in the Post-Pandemic US and East Asia
Based on Henry Yeung’s, Professor, National University of Singapore, lead-authored chapter on semiconductors in Global Value Chain Development Report 2023 (WTO/ADB, October 2023) and his monograph Interconnected Worlds (Stanford University Press, June 2022), this presentation offers some key empirical observations on the highly contested and politicized nature of semiconductor global production networks since the US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this capital-intensive manufacturing industry, governance and power dynamics are manifested differently from many other industries due to highly complex technology regimes, production network ecosystems, and, more recently, geopolitical imperatives. While some of these critical dynamics had been in play ahead of the 2020s in China, Taiwan, and South Korea, their intensity and significance became more apparent by the early 2020s. Yeung then examines their most significant implications for East Asian development in the post-pandemic 2020s and the need for strategic partnership with technology leaders towards building national and regional resilience in the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia. Yeung ends with a discussion of some relevant future research agendas on technology, resilience, and politics for the interdisciplinary studies of global production networks and global value chains. Sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, the Burkle Center for International Relations, and the Department of Geography.
May 14, 2024 | 5:00 PM PDT
Welcome to China? Foreign Donations and Chinese Foundations (Global Chinese Philanthropy Lecture)
The crowding in or out theory primarily focuses on the resource management approach and the relationships between domestic government funds and private donations contributed to nonprofit organizations (NPOs). However, the managerial approach does not capture a political approach, which theorizes the dual roles of foreign donations to domestic nonprofits. The political approach posits that foreign donations may either augment domestic contributions by supporting the coproduction of public goods or diminish them by posing a potential threat to China's authoritarian rule because they bolster civil society. Both the managerial and political approaches cannot clearly predict whether domestic supporters will welcome (crowding in) or reject (crowding out) foreign contributions to NPOs. This study utilizes a unique dataset of Chinese foundations to empirically test whether the domestic government and citizens welcome foreign donations to NPOs. Our findings reveal a substantial decline in foreign donations to Chinese foundations since 2014. Nevertheless, for nonprofits that received foreign donations, they exhibited no effects on government funding and varying degrees of crowding in private contributions. Speaker: Huafang Li, assistant professor of public and nonprofit management. Sponsored by the Asia Pacific Center and the Center for Chinese Studies.
May 15, 2024 | 4:00 PM PDT
Difficult Subjects: Religion and Education under the US-Japan Alliance
To what extent is religion a core part of national citizenship, and to what extent should religions be involved in educating juvenile citizens? Historically, this two-part question has been difficult to answer because people reasonably disagree on matters of democratic principle. But it has also been irresolvable because it hinges on an unwieldy term: religion. Adopting a supranational approach by focusing on the transpacific US-Japan Alliance, this talk tracks the fallout of the “1947 Settlement”—a moment when new Japanese legislation and groundbreaking American jurisprudence clarified that public education should not involve confessional instruction. Although the 1947 Settlement ostensibly clarified the relationship between religion and education, the “new normal” actually elicited considerable confusion, especially as Japan and the United States both embraced religiosity as one of the distinguishing features of Cold War capitalist democracy. This talk tracks how ensuing debates over patriotic ritual, moral instruction, vocational training, and sex education reflected uncertainties about the relationship between religion, democratic citizenship, and capitalist subjectivity. Along the way, it upends some conventional narratives about late twentieth-century “secularization” while also showing how religious studies offers indispensable tools for understanding some of the most vexing legal and political dilemmas of our time. Speaker: Jolyon Thomas, book author. Sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies.
May 16, 2024 | 10:00 AM PDT
Sudan: The Lesser Known War
On April 15, 2023, the war broke out in Sudan between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Response Forces (RSF) — led by the generals who, together, staged a coup against the civilian-led transitional government and effectively cut Sudan's journey towards democracy. Join us to learn the latest on the state of the war in Sudan, the country's humanitarian situation, and the international community's efforts to stop the war. Panelists: Ms. Reem Abbas, non-resident fellow at TIMEP focusing on land, conflict, and resources in Sudan; Mr. Hamid Khalafallah, development practitioner, researcher and policy analyst; and Ms. Weam Shawgi Hassan, feminist and defender of gender rights originally from Khartoum, Sudan. Moderator: Dr. Mohamed Abubakr, Sudanese human rights activist and peacemaker with a decade and a half of civil society experience. Sponsored by the Center for Middle East Development, UCLA International Institute, African Studies Center, Burkle Center for International Relations, Political Science and the Department of Public Policy.
May 16, 2024 | 10:30 AM PDT
Asian Americans and Their Communities
Dr. Min Zhou, distinguished professor of sociology & Asian American studies, Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.-China Relations & Communications, and director of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, speaks at Pasadena City College about how contemporary migration has transformed Asian America, especially in the San Gabriel Valley. Dr. Zhou discusses cultural identity, economic development, stereotyping and anti-Asian racism, and the political evolution of a multi-ethnic, globalized community. Sponsored by the Asia Pacific Center and Pasadena City College.
May 17, 2024 | 12:00 PM PDT
Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders
The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out-of-date. In Transnational Social Protection, Peggy Levitt, Erica Dobbs, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Ruxandra Paul consider what happens to social welfare when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they receive health, education, and elder care. The authors use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings and the ways that these vary by place and time. They further show how a new, hybrid transnational social protection regime has emerged in response to the changing environment that complements, supplements, or, in some cases, substitutes for national social welfare systems as we knew them. Examining how national social welfare is affected when migration and mobility become an integral part of everyday life, this book moves our understanding of social protection from the national to the transnational. Speakers: Peggy Levitt, Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology and Chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College; and Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics at Pomona College. Sponsored by the Center for Study of International Migration, CCIS and UCSD.
May 18, 2024 | 8:00 AM PDT
CISA Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on South Asia
CISA invites abstracts for presentation at the Annual Graduate Conference on South Asia to be held at UCLA on May 18, 2024. The conference is a unique opportunity for graduate students and faculty to come together and engage in cross-disciplinary conversations about research on South Asia. This one-day conference aims to create a forum for presenting and discussing current research on South Asia from a wide range of disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities, science and technology studies, public policy, and business programs. Program allowing, we also invite presentations in audio-visual and other creative media formats. We welcome submissions from graduate students at all stages of their careers, including early-career researchers, and encourage presentations that are accessible to an interdisciplinary audience and that foster dialogue across fields. The keynote address for this conference will be given by Sunila S. Kale & Christian Lee Novetzke. Sponsored by the Center for India and South Asia.