CEAS Postdoctoral Associates Lecture Series

This talk examines the active legal role of Buddhist monastics in the society of Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Chosŏn is thought to have been particularly successful in using the law to advance Neo-Confucianism and persecute Buddhism into irrelevance. Although scholars have long called for a reorientation of that understanding of Chosŏn Buddhism, a workable alternative picture of its social realities has remained elusive.  I provide one. Introducing the prodigious litigation in which Buddhist monastics became involved throughout those five centuries, I show that rather than grinding monastics out...

In this talk, I explore the relationship between ethnicity and the changing meaning of Chineseness at the turn of the twenty-first century. I will offer the idea of “Chinese/ethnoscapes” as a framework for thinking about “China” through distinctly ethnic (and ethnicized) worldviews, particularly as they are expressed in two literary examples. First, I will address the ethnically Tibetan, Chinese writer Alai’s award-winning novel Red Poppies. By engaging in a reading of the story that accounts for and takes seriously the Tibetan worldview it suggests, I contend that the novel contains an...

Lunch will be served. This talk focuses on the rural-to-urban transformation of South Korean society in the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the growth of informal communities and shantytowns in and around the capital Seoul. A focus on these peripheralized and subaltern communities highlights new aspects of state-led developmentalism absent from our current literature, demonstrating how the promises of the Park Chung Hee government (1961-1979) opened up new and often unexpected spaces for social and political action even as officials attempted to impose a regime of discipline over urban space. I...

Lunch will be served. The past few decades have seen the proliferation of “natures” in Taipei. Reflecting rising environmental consciousness in this island nation, words like lü (green), shengtai (ecology), and ziran (nature), are now firmly part of the city’s official discourse and policies. As green urbanism sees increasing support among Taipei’s officials and planners, various environmental amenities (riverside parks, bicycle paths, and hike trails) have been built to foster urban citizens’ intimacy with Taipei’s rivers, forests, and mountains.  Especially focusing on the transformation of...

Lunch will be served. Legislators are typically members of political parties, but few democracies require legislators to remain with a single party. Legislators are free to switch from one political party to another between elections, but the consequences of party switching  remain unknown. Do voters reward party defection if it benefits themselves and their district? Or do they punish these defectors at the ballot box? This research looks at both the electoral and party-based outcomes of party defection. Using Japan as a primary case study, it explores whether party switchers benefit or...

In modern authoritarian China, urban statistics may not be available or is available but inaccessible to the public. Dr. Chang will introduce a method called “the view from above” that overcomes these barriers such that even in the absence of official urban statistics and even where available city maps have on them only outlines, he can still produce maps that show detailed land use. He owes this power to the method’s two procedural arms, integrative scaling and inferential digitisation: the one integrates information from one scale to information at another scale, and the other infers land...

In 1873, the Hokkaido Colonial Agency built an orchard on the grounds of its new capitol building, located in the center of Sapporo. This orchard facilitated the transfer of fruit trees and other plants throughout Hokkaido, Japan, and the wider world, and helped turn Hokkaido’s forests and marshes into an agricultural landscape that resembled New England or Wisconsin. This conscious remaking of Hokkaido’s environment to facilitate Japanese expansion resembled the processes of settler-colonialism around the world, but also drew on long-standing efforts by the Japanese state to settle the...

Lunch will be served. This talk contends that China’s approach to developing biotechnology centers on the principle of “technological domestication”, whereby social anxieties surrounding genetically modified technology are recast as an opposition to foreign aggressors, be they countries, companies, or individual actors. This nationalist frame is a principle of institution building, generating not only distinctly “Chinese” technologies, but also new ethical frameworks, modalities of social order, and ontologies of state, science, and market collaboration. In this talk, I focus on how these...

Lunch will be served. The Xiongnu have been of considerable scholarly interest since their first description by Sima Qian in his Shiji from the early first century BCE, and are best known as the nemesis of the “Middle Country” during the Han Dynasty, described by their Han contemporaries as brutal horse riding barbarians that live by the drawing of the bow. This lecture will explore the character of the Xiongnu from a four-field anthropological approach (Culture, Language, Archaeology and Bioanthropological), examining what each field has to offer to the discussion to date, and what we can...