Past Events – East Asia National Resource Center

Intersections of Disability in Sinophone Cultures

February 25, 2025March 10, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Disability in Asian Studies: Intersections of Disability in Sinophone Cultures

Thursday, March 6th, 2025 from 1:00-3:00 pm ET

Virtual Event via Zoom

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About the event:

The East Asia National Resource Center is proud to present Diversity in East Asia: Intersections of Disability in Sinophone Cultures.

Professor Hangping Xu will discuss his research on disabled figures in CCP literature. In the 1950s when China broke away from its ideological tie to the Soviet Union, the CCP authorities promoted Wu Yunduo as “China’s Pavel” to replace the bed-ridden, blind protagonist of the Russian novel How the Steel was Tempered, who had already become the revolutionary hero in the Chinese imagination. Wu wrote an autobiography entitled Devoting Everything to the Party (ba yiqie xiangei dang; 1953), in which he chronicles how he ultimately makes himself disabled by experimenting with dynamite for military use. Wu risked his life to test out and manufacture weapons for the New Fourth Army’s arsenal. He lost his left eye and left leg, destroyed four fingers and had built numerous metal bits into his body. Both Wu and Pavel are imagined as what Disability Studies scholars call “super-crip.” Their political, or even spiritual, arrival at the hegemonic cultural mandates of revolutionary ideology overcompensates the otherwise unbearable pains of their corporeal being. Their health and bodily integrity deteriorate as their revolutionary spirit towers above their tangible corporality. This presentation offers a critical reading of Wu’s autobiography with a comparative look at Pavel and with a contextualization of the period. Professor Hangping Xu will argue that disability functions as an aesthetic foil with which to imagine the superhuman revolutionary subject, concretizing the ideological fantasy of the invincible national body politic. The revolutionary body is not only perfect, grand, and tall; beautifully disabled, it also transcends the biological limits of the flesh.

In this session, Dr. Carmen Yau will also talk about the intersectionality of disabled women in Chinese communities. She will start by sharing her work on domestic and partner violence against disabled women. She will further explore the agency of disabled women to navigate abusive relationships. She will also share her recent work on a photovoice to unearth the story of disabled women being carers, which facilitates policy change to recognize the entitlement and welfare for disabled carers.

About the Speakers

Hangping Xu is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, film and media studies, queer and crip studies, and theories of world literature. His first book project examines disability politics and aesthetics in modern Chinese culture. His articles have appeared in such venues as Chinese Literature Today, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, A Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment, Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, and Prism: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. He co-edited a special issue, Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World, for the journal Prism: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.

Carmen Yau is a full-time Lecturer in Social Work and the Lead of Wellbeing Research Unit in the Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a certified sexuality educator. She is also a Mental Health First Aid Champion awarded by the MHFA England. Carmen is a multi-award-winning advocate in the community of the disabled. In 2024, she won the Disability 100 as the most influential disabled individual in the UK. In 2021, she was nominated for UN Women’s Rise and Raise Others Award as an acknowledgement of achievements that she has made supporting and inspiring women and girls all over the world. In 2020, She was the third-place winner in Tatler’s Hot List of “Sixteen Women Fighting for Fairness in Asia”.

Korea Policy Forum: “U.S. Trade Policy Shifts and the Future of the U.S.-South Korea Economic Relations”

February 18, 2025February 25, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Korea Policy Forum: U.S. Trade Policy Shifts and the Future of the U.S.-South Korea Economic Relations

Monday, February 24th, 2025 at 3:00 pm ET

Hybrid Event

Elliott School of International Affairs, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

1957 E Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20052

Virtual Via Zoom

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Citizen Activism in the Wake of Korea’s Martial Law Declaration: Student and Faculty Perspectives

February 5, 2025February 6, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Citizen Activism in the Wake of Korea’s Martial Law Declaration: Student and Faculty Perspectives

Wednesday, February 5th, 2025 at 7:00 pm ET

Virtual Event via Zoom

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About the event:

Join the GW Institute for Korean Studies for our next installment of our Korea Policy Forum, entitled “Citizen Activism in the Wake of Korea’s Martial Law Declaration: Student and Faculty Perspectives” in collaboration with the East Asia National Resource Center (NRC).

Over the past two months, South Korean citizens have taken to the streets in large numbers to defend democracy. Some rallied despite the midnight cold following President Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law and sustained peaceful rallies that contributed to Yoon’s impeachment. Others also mobilized to show their support for Yoon and protest his detention. This Korea Policy Forum adopts an innovative format by bringing together professors and students whose participant observation of this most recent wave of activism gave them front-row seats in this significant political moment in Korea. The speakers will discuss issues that mobilized citizens, cross-generational solidarity, activists’ tactics (both classic and novel), the organizations and professionals who facilitated mobilization, media coverage, and the social and political impact of citizens’ activism.

About the Speakers

Judy Han is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. She is committed to building critical and transnational conversations concerning gender, sexuality, and activism, and regularly contributes to community-based projects and public events both on campus and beyond.

Her comics and writings about (im)mobilities, religion and faith-based movements, and queer politics have been published in Journal of Asian Studies, Critical Asian Studies, positions: Asia critique, and Journal of Korean Studies as well as in several edited books including Religion, Protest, Social Upheaval (2022), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South (2015), and Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998). She is the author of Queer Throughlines: Spaces of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest

Sung Soo Hong is a professor at Sookmyung Women’s University. His main areas of research are jurisprudence, socio-legal studies, and human rights law, and he has recently studied the issues of human rights, discrimination, hate speech, and hate crimes. He has focused on the role of law in these areas. His recent Korean publications include Reason in Law: Understanding Law with Films (2019), Human Rights Systems and Institutions (with Kim and Park, 2018), and When Words Hurt: What is Hate Speech (2018).

John Lee is a sophomore in the Elliott School, double majoring in International Affairs and political Science, with a minor in Economics and Public Studies. John was born in South Korea and moved to San Jose, California when he was 10. From his background in moving back and forth between the U.S. and South Korea, he developed an interest in U.S.-South Korea relations, primarily political and economic issues. During his time at Seoul national University in the summer of 2024, he developed a further interest in the Korean macroeconomy and the importance of politics for Korean companies. He is also passionate about major Korean social issues, such as the Korean education system, Korean generational conflict, high suicide rates, and gender conflicts. Aside from academics, he loves to watch and play soccer, listen to Korean rap music, and sing songs.

Disability in Early Modern Japan

February 5, 2025February 19, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Blindness and Leprosy in Early Modern Japan (1)

Disability in Asian Studies: Blindness and Leprosy in Early Modern Japan

Tuesday, February 18th, 2025 from 3:00-5:00 pm ET

Virtual Event via Zoom

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About the event:

The East Asia National Resource Center is proud to present Diversity in East Asia: Blindness and Leprosy in Early Modern Japan.

Blindness in Early Modern Japan: Perspectives from Disability Studies/History with professor Wayne Tan
This presentation will explore the cultural and historical contexts of blindness in early modern Japan (1600-1868), and asks: What was blindness, and how did people live with blindness? Featuring examples of early modern Japanese medical culture and social history, Professors Wayne Tan will explain how the methods of disability studies/history enhance our understanding of disability in Japanese society, and why we need new approaches to expand the coverage of current disability studies/history.

From Bad Karma to Bad Blood: The Medicalization of Leprosy in Early Modern Japan with Professor Susan L. Burns
Raibyō or “leprosy,” a disease category that likely included both true leprosy (as defined by the presence of M. leprae) and other disfiguring skin diseases, was a highly stigmatized disease in Japan from ancient times. In the early modern period, it became the object of an explosion of medical writing in the form of treatises and case studies, as doctors debated its causes, curability, and the possibility of treatment. In this presentation, Professor Susan Burns will explore the medicalization of leprosy and its social and cultural effects. She argues that medicalization did not lessen the stigma of the leprosy but in fact heightened it. As leprosy came to be understood as a disease of “bad blood,” not only individual sufferers but also their family members were subject to discrimination.

About the Speakers

Wei Yu Wayne Tan is Professor of History at Hope College in Michigan. He is a historian of disability, science, and medicine in Japan and East Asia. His first book, Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity (University of Michigan Press, 2022), received awards and honors from the American Historical Association, the Disability History Association, and the Social Science History Association. His current research focuses on the intersection of disability, science, and race in the interconnected histories of Asians and Asian Americans.

Susan Burns is a historian of Japan’s “long” nineteenth century (1780s–1910s), interested in the social history of intellectual and cultural practices and the continuities and ruptures between what conventional periodization terms Japan’s “early modern” and “modern” eras. Her first book, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke, 2003) examined the nativist discourse of the late Tokugawa period. It traced the efforts of early nineteenth century intellectuals to define the nature of “Japan” as a locus of personal and cultural identity and the appropriation of aspects of this discourse by modern scholars who sought to define the contours of modern Japanese nationalism. With the completion of this project, she turned to a new set of questions related to the history of the body as it came to be conceptualized within medical and legal discourses. Her second monograph, Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) explores the long history of leprosy in Japan from the late medieval period when it was identified as a “karmic retribution disease” to the modern period when attempts to control the disease prompted the creation of a system of public sanitaria. She argues that in the modern era leprosy, a particularly stigmatized disease, became the object of an intense debate on the place of the chronically ill and disabled within the Japanese nation.

She is currently working on two additional monographs. The first explores the intellectual and professional world of an early modern doctor who practiced in the villages in Akita in the 1830s and ’40s. It seeks to explore the impact of new forms of knowledge, techniques, and materia medica for medical practice and considers the implications of the “medical revolution” of the early nineteenth century for the state-sponsored introduction of Western biomedicine after 1870. The second builds on her research on medical commodities, alternative therapies, and psychiatric practice and explores the impact of the new medical marketplace on ideas about mental health in Japan from c. 1880–1940. She is also working on a digital project called Mapping Medical Tokyo that seeks to visualize and analyze the spatial dimensions of health, disease, and medical care in the Meiji-era city.

Mark – A Call to Action

February 5, 2025February 25, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Talk flyer with a picture of Ruth Mostern and a satellite image of the Yellow River delta

Mark – A Call to Action

Thursday, February 20th from 5:00-7:30PM

Lindner Family Commons

About the event:

Mark – A Call to Action documents the life and work of Mark Bookman, an expert on disability and accessibility in Japan. Mark’s experiences and professional work challenge society to improve access and create environments that support the disabled. The screening will be followed by a roundtable discussion between the director of the film, Ron Small, Mark’s father, Paul Bookman, and GW faculty Celeste Arrington and Richard Grinker.

The film will be screened with closed captions and there will be sign language interpretation for the roundtable discussion. Please contact the organizers with any concerns about accessibility for the screening.

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About the Speakers

Dr. Paul Bookman, the father of Dr. Mark and Rachel Bookman, is a dentist practicing in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania since 1987. He is a graduate of Tulane University and University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. Paul is beloved by his patients and is consistently voted “one of the Best Dentists” by Main Line Today Magazine and Philadelphia Magazine.

Prior to the passing of his son in December of 2022, and his daughter in July of 2024, Dr. Bookman was an avid outdoor enthusiast. He spent most of his free time bicycling, skiing, scuba diving, and taking care of his two dogs with his wife Dr. Wasna Dabbagh. Although he still enjoys these activities, he now devotes most of his energies to preserving the legacy and ideals of The GLIDE Fund of the Mark Bookman Foundation. Created by Mark, GLIDE stands for Global Leaders in International Disability Education.

As the father of two chronically ill and disabled children, Paul has spent the better part of 30 years dealing with hospitals, life threatening illnesses, and obstacles trying to make life easier for his two affected children. With the formation of the Foundation, he is now embarking on a new phase of his life. He plans to carry on the disability advocacy work of his son and daughter by making sure that the GLIDE Fund of the Mark Bookman Foundation grows internationally and provides financial assistance to disabled students interested in education exchange experiences to foster an inclusive society in which anyone can led an independent and self- determined life.

Ron Small began his media career in New Orleans during his pre-med studies at Tulane University, producing, directing and voicing nearly 1,000 local, regional and national TV and radio commercials before moving to Los Angeles for his real education. From these auspicious beginnings came a career spanning film, television, radio, infomercials, corporate videos, entertainment programs, podcasts and documentaries throughout the world.

Career highlights include:

Opened the Faux Pas Comedy Club in New Orleans featuring stand-up and improv. His original headliner was a then-unknown Ellen DeGeneres.
Formed the Holocaust Education Film Foundation to preserve the stories of Holocaust Survivors.
In 2021 was awarded a Best Director Emmy for the National PBS release “I Danced for the Angel of Death,” featuring famed survivor, psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller “The Choice, Dr. Edith Eva Eger.”
Released in 2024, produced, directed, wrote and narrated “Mark – A Call to Action,” highlighting global Disability Advocate Dr. Mark Bookman,” a Fulbright Scholar and himself a fully-disabled individual who overcame insurmountable odds to earn a PhD from University of Pennsylvania, speak fluent Japanese and become a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo.

Professor Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She is the Director of the GW Institute for Korea Studies and Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2024-Present). She specializes in comparative public policy, law and social change, lawyers, and governance, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. She is also interested in Northeast Asian security, North Korean human rights, and transnational activism. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published numerous articles and, with Patricia Goedde, she co-edited Rights Claiming in South Korea (Cambridge, 2021).

Her next book, forthcoming in Cambridge’s Studies in Law and Society series, analyzes the legalistic turn in Korean and Japanese regulatory style through paired case studies related to tobacco control and disability rights. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Princeton University. She has been a fellow at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. GW’s Office of the Vice President for Research awarded her the 2021 Early Career Research Scholar Award. Her article with Claudia Kim won the 2023 Asian Law and Society Association’s distinguished article award.

Dr. Richard Grinker is a cultural anthropologist specializing in ethnicity, nationalism, and psychological anthropology, with topical expertise in autism, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa. He is also the director of GW’s Institute for Ethnographic Research and editor-in-chief of of the journal Anthropological Quarterly.

Unearthing Similarities: Okinawan Religion’s Entanglements in Japanese Rule, 1878-1945

January 29, 2025February 18, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Unearthing Similarities: Okinawan Religion’s Entanglements in Japanese Rule, 1878-1945

Thursday, February 13th, 2024 from 4:00-5:00 pm ET

In-Person and Virtual Event via Zoom

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About the event:

For the communities across the islands of the Ryukyu archipelago that today constitute Japan’s southernmost prefecture, Okinawa, ritual life was historically anchored in an indigenous religion centering on uganju sacred sites and overseen by assemblages of female ritualists. These islands’ formal annexation by Japan in 1879 brought them into direct contact with, and under the direct control of, a Japanese state that was in the process of crafting Shinto into a tool of government. For Okinawa, one result of this encounter was the conversion of uganju sites across the prefecture into Shinto shrines, underpinned by claims of similarity between Okinawan religion and Japanese Shinto. Dr. Tze Loo will examine the emergence and implications of this claim of similarity as part of an exploration of this little-known history.

About the Speaker

Dr. Tze Loo is an Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at the University of Richmond. Her research is concerned with the colonial dimensions of the modern Japanese nation state, in both its prewar and wartime imperial expansion and also in how colonialism functioned in the making of modern Japan itself. Loo is interested in how the Japanese state reproduces itself and its power, and pays attention to two technologies of government in particular. The first is how the Japanese state power makes itself felt through objects of material culture and cultural heritage; the second is the prewar Japanese state’s efforts to discipline the country’s religious landscape through the construction and deployment of State Shinto. Loo also traces how subjects of the Japanese state resist or contest these same technologies.

Loo’s book, Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa’s Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879-2000, examines how Japan, America during its 27-year rule of the islands, and Okinawan people use Okinawa’s cultural heritage – particularly its iconic Shuri Castle – to negotiate and articulate the islands’ relationship to the Japanese mainland. While Japanese and the U.S. attempted to use the islands’ cultural heritage to discipline Okinawans according to their political agendas, Okinawans used representations of their cultural heritage as a powerful way to act against these larger powers and to negotiate a more equitable position for themselves within the Japanese national imaginary. Loo is currently working on a new project that traces the Japanese state’s attempt to transpose Okinawa’s indigenous utaki-centered religion into the universe of State Shinto in the prewar period.

2025 China Peripheries Seminar

January 29, 2025March 10, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

01: Friday, February 7, 3:00-5:00pm

02: Friday, February 28, 3:00-5:00pm

03: Friday, March 7, 3:00-5:00pm

Hybrid In-Person and Virtual Events via Zoom

About the event:

The China Peripheries Seminar is a series of policy-oriented talks on the ethnically diverse and highly contested regions along China’s geographical edges, this year’s hybrid seminar focuses on key transformations taking place in China and Greater China today. The seminar will feature scholars who combine deep insider-outsider knowledge with analysis of policy. The three sessions will discuss developments in China’s territorial peripheries (Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong) and explore dynamics on China’s internal and overseas frontiers. Each session will look at the specific ways that policies affect grassroot politics, and vice versa. Several of our speakers come from a new generation of scholars who are themselves from China’s territorial peripheries and who combine deep insider-outsider knowledge with analysis of policy.

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About the Speakers

Rebecca Clothey, PhD, is Professor and Department Head, Global Studies and Modern Languages at Drexel University with a joint appointment as Professor in the Drexel School of Education. Her research interests primarily include ethnicity and community-driven education initiatives. In particular, her recent research has focused on the efforts of the Uyghur community to maintain and preserve their culture for the next generation both within China and in the Diaspora.

Nicole Willock is an Assistant Professor of Asian religions at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, with a Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies and Religious Studies from Indiana University Bloomington. Through her translations of writings by Tibetan polymaths, such as Tseten Zhabdrung, her research examines the intersections between moral agency, Tibetan literature, Buddhist modernism, and state-driven secularization projects in twentieth-century Tibet.

Denise Y. Ho (何若書) is an associate professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she teaches modern Chinese history. She is the author of Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Tashi Rabgey is Research Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School where she specializes in statehood, authoritarianism and territorial politics, with a focus on multilevel governance and the politics of scale in the People’s Republic of China. She also works on constitutional and international legal issues relating to special status arrangements of asymmetric states and autonomous regions in comparative global contexts. Her primary regional focus is Tibet and Greater China, with a specialization in the Sino-Tibetan dispute.

Amy Liu is a professor and the Director of Graduate Admissions and Placement in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in issues of ethnic politics, language policies, and international migration, with regional focuses on Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Her current work studies Chinese communities in Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia. She has gone into the field to study Chinese migrant communities in Romania with the support of a 2015-2016 J. William Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award.

Sean R. Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies (IDS) MA program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He has studied the Uyghur people for 30 years, and he is the author of The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority.

About the Organizer:

Associate Professor Eric Schluessel (History and International Affairs at George Washington University) is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Registration

This event is open to the public. Guests who register for the online event will receive details for joining the Zoom meeting.

Through Ports of No Return: Entrances of the African into China

October 24, 2024February 10, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Through Ports of No Return: Entrances of the African into China

Monday, November 18th, 2024 from 4:00-5:00 pm ET

Virtual Event via Zoom

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About the event:

Given that Chinese geographical knowledge of Africa is attested to in sources dated as early as the ninth century of the Common Era, our assumption that there might well have been an African presence in China extending back more than a millennium seems hardly overestimated. However, this supposition will likely remain forever theoretical because of the linguistic indiscriminateness—at least prior to and right up until relatively modern times—evinced by Chinese references to encounters with peoples they themselves deemed to be black. This talk focuses on the crucial transitional moment leading to when a preponderance of these blacks entering China could only have been Africans. Moreover, being intended to provide insights regarding the consequential ramifications of this understudied occurrence in world history, this talk also addresses the vital questions of how and why these Africans had come to reside in China at all, before concluding with some informed speculation on their eventual collective fate.

About the Speaker

Don J. Wyatt (A.B. Beloit; A.M., Ph.D. Harvard), Distinguished Professor since 2010, has taught both history and philosophy at Middlebury College since 1986. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research most currently focused on the intersections between identity and violence and the nexuses between ethnicity and slavery. He is the author of The Blacks of Premodern China (2009) and Slavery in East Asia (2023), with the latter being a contribution to the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series. He is editor for the forthcoming four-volume set on ethnicity and race in Bloomsbury Publishing’s The Medieval World series. He is a co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, immediate past chair of the newly established Diversity and Equity Committee of the Association for Asian Studies, and an incoming member of the Inclusivity and Diversity Committee of the Medieval Academy of America..

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies and GW Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) together received the highly regarded designation of National Resource Center (NRC) for East Asian Studies. The designation — the first time these two centers have received NRC status — enhances the institutes’ ability to engage the broader public community, including students, K-12 educators, HBCUs, policymakers, military veterans, journalists and the general public on regional and global issues of importance. With this award, GW joins a handful of other world-leading universities with this honor, including Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Additionally, the Sigur Center and GWIKS have been awarded funding for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships which support undergraduate and graduate students studying modern foreign languages and related area or international studies.

Deconstructing Racism “Denial” in Asia

September 16, 2024January 3, 2025Past EventsLeave a Comment

Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 1:15-3:00 pm ET

Room 505, Elliott School of International Affairs

About the event:

Join us for a focused discussion on research from the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), exploring the critical intersection of racism and nationalism in Asian contexts. As Asia becomes increasingly central to the global economy and culture, it faces significant challenges, including rising inequality, cultural intolerance, and institutional shortcomings. SNAPL is committed to addressing these issues through interdisciplinary, evidence-based, and policy-relevant research. This event will highlight SNAPL’s discourse analysis of reports submitted by 16 Asian countries to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The research investigates how race and racism are conceptualized in these reports, uncovering patterns of “denial” and exploring how these perspectives align with or diverge from those in other global contexts. The discussion will also examine how historical identities and dominant social, political, and religious values shape national understandings of race in Asia. We aim to foster a deeper understanding of racism, often underdiscussed in the region, and promote the critical dialogue necessary for building a socially and culturally mature “Next Asia.” Two distinguished discussants—Dr. Hiromi Ishizawa from George Washington University and Dr. Erin Aeran Chung from Johns Hopkins University—will join us to share their insights, ensuring a lively and engaging conversation on these pressing issues.

About the Speakers

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in Sociology; senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center since 2005; and the founding director of the Korea Program since 2001, all at Stanford University. As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.

Shin is not only the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, but also continues to actively raise funds for Korean/Asian studies at Stanford. He gives frequent lectures and seminars on topics ranging from Korean nationalism and politics to Korea’s foreign relations and historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia and to talent strategies. He serves on councils and advisory boards in the United States and South Korea and promotes policy dialogue between the two allies. He regularly writes op-eds and gives interviews to the media in both Korean and English.

Junki Nakahara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), housed within the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Her research interests include nationalism and xenophobia, critical and cultural studies, feminist (digital) media studies, and postcolonial/decolonial international relations. As an inaugural member of SNAPL, she leads the “Nationalism and Racism” research track, focusing on two major projects: (1) Racism “Denial” in Asian State Party Reports to the UN CERD, and (2) Elite Articulation of “Multiculturalism” in Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis and computational textual analysis, the team examines how nationalism and racism intertwine to create various forms of suppression and intolerance across the Asia-Pacific region, where entanglements among race, ethnicity, nation, and postcoloniality complicate the related debates.

After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Hiromi Ishizawa spent two years as a post-doctoral research associate at the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in the areas of social and family demography, immigration, sociology of language, and urban sociology. Her research focuses on the understanding of how immigrants integrate into American society. In particular, her work emphasizes the influence of context, such as family and neighborhood, on the process of integration. She has published work that examines many aspects of immigrant integration, including minority language maintenance, civic participation, health, sequence of migration within family units, intermarriage, and residential settlement patterns among minority language speakers.

Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Professor of East Asian Politics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She previously served as founding co-director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program and director of the East Asian Studies Program at Hopkins, and as co-president of the APSA Migration and Citizenship Section.

Professor Chung specializes in East Asian political economy, comparative citizenship and migration politics, civil society, and comparative racial politics, and she is currently serving as co-editor of the Politics and Society of East Asia Elements series at Cambridge University Press and as founding co-director of the Initiative on Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) at Hopkins.

Okinawa’s Subnational Diplomacy: Promoting Cooperation and Preventing Conflict in East Asia

September 9, 2024September 16, 2024Past EventsLeave a Comment

Wednesday, September 11th, 2024 at 4:00-5:15 pm ET

State Room, Elliott School of International Affairs and Online

About the event:

The security and economic environment surrounding Okinawa is becoming more uncertain and worrisome. In response, the Okinawa Prefectural Government recently launched its Subnational Diplomacy initiative to promote cooperation and prevent conflict in East Asia. Governor Denny Tamaki of Okinawa will discuss the basic thinking behind this Subnational Diplomacy, some of the concrete steps taken thus far, and the prospects for the future. Then a panel of prominent experts on Japan, international relations, and security policy will comment on Governor Tamaki’s remarks and assess the opportunities and constraints that Okinawa faces to develop and exert its influence in shaping the regional environment.

About the Speakers

Governor Denny Tamaki was first elected as Governor of Okinawa in October 2018 and was re-elected again in September 2022 to serve another four-year term. He was a member of the House of Representatives of Japan from 2009 to 2018 (4 terms). Prior to that, he was a member of the Okinawa City Assembly from 2002 to 2005. He graduated from Sophia School of Social Welfare. He was born in Okinawa in 1959.

Sheila A. Smith is a John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, she is the author of Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China (released in Japanese as 日中親愛なる宿敵: 変容する日本政治と対中政策), and Japan’s New Politics and the U.S.-Japan Alliance. She is also the author of the CFR interactive guide Constitutional Change in Japan. Smith is a regular contributor to the CFR blog Asia Unbound and a frequent contributor to major media outlets in the United States and Asia.

Dr. Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow & director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. Kavanagh’s research examines U.S. military strategy, force structure and defense budgeting, the defense industrial base, and U.S. military interventions. Her most recent projects have focused on U.S. defense policy in Asia and the Middle East. Previously, Kavanagh was a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She also worked as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where, among other roles, she served as director of RAND’s Army Strategy program. Her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Washington Quarterly, Lawfare, Los Angeles Times, and War on the Rocks, among other outlets. Kavanagh received an AB in Government from Harvard University and a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from the University of Michigan. She is also an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Professor Mochizuki holds the Japan-U.S. Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Dr. Mochizuki was director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies from 2001 to 2005. He co-directs the “Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific” research and policy project of the Sigur Center. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was also Co-Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Policy at RAND and has taught at the University of Southern California and Yale University.