Reinventing East Asia

China’s Quest for “Soft Power”: Imperatives, Impediments, and Irreconcilable Tensions
Yuezhi Zhao, Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Global Communication at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University

Focal Point: Reinventing East Asia- & Information in Society Speaker Series
Date: Thursday, April 28 2011
Public Lecture: 3:30pm – 5:00pm (126 GSLIS )
Small Group Discussion: 5:00pm-6:00Pm (126 GSLIS)

Abstract:

From establishing Confucius Institutes all over the world to mounting an advertising blitz in New York’s Times Square, the Chinese state’s multifaceted endeavour to strengthen its “soft power” has been highly visible and the subject of much recent journalistic and scholarly attention. This talk locates the Chinese state’s “soft power” quest within historical and geopolitical contexts and critically examines its profoundly contradictory underpinning political economy and cultural politics. While this campaign’s political and moral imperatives appear self-evident, its structural impediments seem to be insurmountable. Furthermore, there are irreconcilable tensions between a drive to pursue an essentially elitist, technocratic, andculturalist approach to global communication and a capacity to articulate and communicate an alternative global political and social vision that appeals to the vast majority of the world population in a deeply divided and crises-laden global order.

Biography:

Yuezhi Zhao is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Global Communication at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. She is also a Changjiang Lecture Professor at the Communication University of China, Beijiing. Dr. Zhao’s work concerns both domestic Chinese communication politics and the role of media and information technologies in the global transformations linking to China’s real and imagined rise as a major world political economic power. Her recent books include Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict (2008), Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy (co-edited with Paula Chakravartty, 2008) and Democratizing Global Media: One World, Many Struggles (co-edited with Robert Hackett, 2005).

Co-Sponsors:
Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
Center for Global Studies
Graduate College
Information in Society Program, Graduate School of Library and Information Science

Reappraising Media Culture Connections in East Asia. Koichi Iwabuchi, Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo.

Date: Tuesday, March 1 2011
Public Lecture: 3:30pm – 5:00pm (126 GSLIS )
Small Group Discussion: 5:00pm-6:00Pm (126 GSLIS )

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, we have witnessed the significant development of East Asian media cultural production and inter-Asian media co-production, circulation and consumption. With some focus on the Japanese context, this paper will critically review whether and how these developments have really challenged uneven transnational media cultural flows and promoted cross-border dialogues.

Biography: Koichi Iwabuchi is Professor of the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University. His English publications include: Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002); East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, co-edited with Chua Beng Huat (Hong Kong University Press, 2008). He, together with Chris Berry, is the editor of the Hong Kong University Press book series, TransAsia: Screen Cultures.

A Broadband Heaven or Hyper-surveillant Nation? A Case of South Korea
Lee, Kwang-Suk (이광석 李光錫), a Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Wollongong
 
Focal Point: Reinventing East Asia Speaker series
Thursday, February 17 2011
Public Lecture: 4pm -5:30pm (126 GSLIS Building)
Small Group Discussion: 12pm-1Pm (341 GSLIS Building)
 
Lecture Abstract:
 
S-Korea has been dubbed as a ‘broadband heaven’, one of the most wired nation, while it has been entering into the more advanced and routinized phases of cyberspace control in terms of the government’s convolution of surveillance and censorship with the Chaebols and the telcos. Lee aims to alert the new emerging and normalizing mechanisms of social control in South Korea in terms of online media surveillance. He will introduce the online surveillance techniques by which the government has gradually become ubiquitous power to spread its micro-tentacles into controlling each citizen. Theoretically, using Michael Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplinary societies’ and Gilles Deleuze’s updated concept of ‘control societies’, Lee will see how the techniques of power have been upgraded and even intensified, on the basis of a distributed and ubiquitous network model of control. In details, Lee will critically investigate S-Korea’s recent regulatory polices and surveillant practices controlling the citizens, owing to speed and broadband mobility on the Internet.
 
Speaker Bio:
 
Lee, Kwang-Suk (이광석 李光錫) earned his Ph.D. in Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Lee is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public & Information Technology at Seoul National University of Science & Technology, Seoul. He has been also working as as an ARC (Australian Research Council) research fellow for conducting a 4-year long-term study of Internet History in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. His research areas include global media, Internet studies, critical geographies, surveillance, cultural industries, and alternative media. He is the author of four books, IT development in Korea: A Broadband Nirvana (London: Routledge, forthcoming), The Art & Cultural Politics of Cyber Avant-gardes (Seoul, 2010), Digital Paradoxes: The Political Economy of Cyberspace (Seoul, 2000) and Cultural Politics in Cyberspace (Seoul, 1998). Lee’s scholarly writing has appeared, including Media, Culture & Society, The International Communication Gazette, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, Info, The Government Information Quarterly, and The Information Society. As a columnist, Lee has contributed numerous columns and essays related to the digital society to Korean newspapers, magazines, and the like.
 
 

Internet Politics and Political Participation in Chinese Cyberspace
Zhou Yongming, Professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Friday, November 5 2010

Public Lecture: 3:30-5:00
Small Group Discussion: 5:00-6:00
Location: 319 Gregory Hall

ABSTRACT: Why so much attention has been paid to the Internet in China? Does the Internet have democratizing power? This talk examines the complex relationships connecting information technology and politics in contemporary China. By analyzing how different groups (mainstream intellectuals, marginal online writers, and Chinese nationalists) use the Internet to achieve their goals, this talk aims to present a complicated picture of political participation in the Chinese cyberspace and a more balanced view on the role of Internet in China.

BIO: Zhou Yongming is professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D in cultural anthropology from Duke University. In 2001-2002, he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is the author of books “Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History, and State-Building” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and “Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China” (Stanford University Press, 2006). He has also been a Mellon Fellow at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge and a visiting fellow at the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. His latest project is on the socio-ecological impacts of road construction in the Tibetan areas in the east Himalayas.

The New Argonauts: Global Search and Local Institution-Building
AnnaLee Saxenian, professor and dean at the U.C. Berkely School of Information and a professor in Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning
 
Friday, Oct 22, 2010
Public Lecture: 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Small Group Discussion: 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Location: 319 Gregory Hall
 
Abstract:
This talk examines the growing importance of global, or external, search networks that firms and other actors rely on to locate collaborators who can solve part of a problem they face or require part of a solution they may be able to provide. Saxenian refers to the skilled immigrants who link the members of one variant of these external search networks as the new Argonauts, an allusion to the ancient Greek Jason and the Argonauts, who searched for the Golden Fleece. The talk will argue that the most significant contributions of these skilled professionals to their home countries are not direct transfers of technology or knowledge, but participation in external search and domestic institutional reform. The new Argonauts are ideally positioned to search beyond prevailing routines to identify opportunities for complementary peripheral partcipiation in the global economy and to work with public officials to adapt and redesign relevant institutions and firms in their native countries. They are, therefore, exemplary protagonists of self discovery the process by which an enterprise or entrepreneur determines which markets it can serve and of a micro level institutional reform that can, diffusing and cascading, ultimately produce wider structural transformations.
 
Speaker Biography:
AnnaLee Saxenian (http://people.ischool.berkely.edu/~anno/) is professor and dean at the U.C. Berkely School of Information and a professor in Berkely's Department of City and Regional Planning. Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994), Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002). She holds a PhD in political science from MIT, a master's in regional planning from U.C. Berkely, and a BA in economics from Williams College.
 
This speaker series is funded by a Focal Point Grant from the Graduate College and co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies China Workshop, Center for Global Studies and Information in Society in Library and Information Science.
 

Electronic Waste and the imperative of building an ethnic from the ground up
Melba Velez, an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale
 
Fri, 09/24/2010 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm  
Location: 160 English Building
 
Abstract: When it comes to communication scholarship in the age of environmental crisis, addressing issues of justice is important but not enough. I argue that while our field as a whole admirably strives to explore and promote issues of justice (i.e., [re]distribution, and democratization), we increasingly neglect questions of ethics. Such questions ought to address the time, effort, and labor that go into producing toxic waste that is dumped globally. I'll use the contemporary example of e-waste to problematize how advocating equal access to technology, for example, can spell disaster for all of us.
 
Speaker Bio: Melba Velez (B.A., Purdue University-Calumet; Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI. Velez's areas of research are communication ethics and environmental communication in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Her work examines the ways in which the long-term success of conservation efforts depend upon fundamental shifts in cultural values, in aesthetic and moral communication, and in shared understandings of how the individual fits into social and ecological communities. She presently serves as secretary/treasurer of the National Communication Association Ethics Division and is a three-year member of the Long Term Ecological Research Network, a collaborative effort involving more than 1,100 scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales. This speaker series is funded by a Focal Point Grant from the Graduate College and co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies China Workshop, Center for Global Studies; Information in Society in Library and Information Science, and Institute of Communications Research.