Labor Unrest in Chinese-Invested Enterprises in Turkey: Local Dynamics and Global Implications. Burak Gürel is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-director of the Center for Asian Studies at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. China, once a hub for foreign manufacturing investment, has become a major investor in overseas factories and mines. Disputes at Chinese-owned […]

Beyond Birth Rates: South Korea's Policy Response to Demographic Aging. Examining how demographic shifts shape policy priorities and challenges, Darcie Draught-Véjares from the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will explore the multifaceted implications of population aging, low birth rates, and shrinking workforce on South Korea's domestic politics and international engagements. By […]

Disability Rights, Activism and Changing Governance in South Korea and Japan. Through comparisons of anti-discrimination and accessibility reforms in South Korea and Japan, this talk analyzes the rise of legalistic governance. More formal rules and participation in policymaking and enforcement, including through the courts, mark a change. Celeste Arrington, Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political […]

Extreme Protests - Changing Protest Repertoires in Labor Movements in Neoliberal Korea. Yoonkyung Lee, Department of Sociology & Center for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto, will discuss the question of changing protest methods of labor contention in neoliberal Korea, and asks what explains the emergence of extreme repertoires in labor movements in times […]

China: A Century of Family Revolutions A recent reproductive crisis has brought renewed interest in the century-old “family problem” (家庭问题) and “women’s problem” (妇女问题). Related issues have not only been debated in the discursive field, but also informed cross-border fields such as social policymaking and the law. Intrigued by questions such as why the state […]

Book Talk - Affective Spaces as Method: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China East Asia is saturated with complex emotions. Although emotions play an essential role in the sociopolitical formations of the region, their implications are poorly understood. Affective Spaces: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) explains why and […]

Book Talk: Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. These “Chimerican media,” originating in America but circulating beyond national boundaries, co-create the figure of rising China and demonstrate the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics evenwhen the subject […]

Fixing the Huai River: Engineering Designs and Earthwork Methods Across the 1949 Divide. The Control of the Huai River System was the first massive hydraulic project after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. A close comparison of the 1932 and the 1950s Huai Control projects illuminates important differences in the hydraulic […]

The post Korean War era observed the presence of numerous US military bases. Mixed race Korean children of these decades were often stigmatized as the children of military sex workers and straddled the legal and social borders of citizenship between an ethnic nationalist Korea and a rising superpower that was America. This talk explores mixed […]

Widespread civic duty has emerged as a last bastion against democratic backsliding. Why do some citizens feel a duty to vote, take up arms, and otherwise sacrifice for their democracies? Hur shows that the sense of obligation to be a good citizen is rooted in a force long thought to be detrimental to democracy's potential, […]

The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown In the past ten years, China has rapidly emerged as South Korea’s most important economic partner. With the surge of goods and resources between the two countries, large waves of Korean migrants have opened small ethnic firms in Beijing’s Koreatown, turning a […]