YCAR Calendar

Wednesday, 04 December 2024 | 11:00 to 13:00 EST | Room 857, Eighth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University and virtually via Zoom

With Sana Aiyar, MIT

Respondent: Jonathan Saha, Durham University

Riot examines the apotheosis of Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in Burma that resulted in wide-spread violence against Muslims led by the sangha in 1938. This chapter decenters the separation of 1935 as the broader context from which to examine the riots by taking seriously the original trigger of the violence – theological pamphlets that had circulated across India and Burma since the late 19^th century that brought Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims in Burma into debate. These publications raised existential questions about the truthfulness of god, challenging Buddhist monks, Muslim Maulvis and Hindu Swamis to prove the superiority of their religion. At the same time, these texts aimed at proselytizing, through dialogue, laymen and women, whose readings and interpretations of the same were mediated by their social and political context. The inter-religious, inter-textual discourses of these tracts invoked the sacred geography and community of India and Burma. The separation of 1935 drew a cartographic line on this map, but it did not fracture the shared religious geography and religious communities that had been constituted by these custodians of faith. This chapter situates the riots of 1938 within this intimate politico-religious map to highlight the wide resonance and long-lasting reverberation of the sangha’s call to action. The circulation and networks of religious debate and majoritarian politics that produced the authors of these texts not only predated but outlasted the separation of 1935. The xenophobic nationalism that violently expressed itself in July 1938, I argue, was in fact the articulation of the shared project of Hindu and Buddhist religious majoritarianism that coalesced in the 1930s around the imagined existential threat posed by Muslims in India and Burma. This was the first successful mass mobilization of religious majoritarianism in South Asia which anticipated the partition of 1947 by a decade and emerged from the same exclusionary Hindu and Buddhist nationalist politics that marginalized Muslims in both India and Burma.

This event is part of the Burma Past and Present: Religion, Ethnicity and Power, a series of readings and discussion of works in progress. We will be reading and discussing work in progress with the author. Please email hmlwin@yorku.ca to receive a copy of the reading.

This event is hybrid. Virtual attendees should register at this link.

Tuesday, 03 December 2024 | 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. | Room 280N, Second Floor, York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University

The York Centre for Asian Research warmly invites all York students, faculty and visitors interested in Asia/Diasporas to an End of Term Social.

Drop by for refreshments and snacks and meet with colleagues and friends in our research community.

Please register at this link to help us organize catering.

Monday, 02 December 2024 | 11:30 to 13:00 EST | Room 280N, Second Floor, York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University

The Korean Office for Research and Education at the York Centre for Asian Research welcomes you to a casual reception for faculty and students at York with interests in Korea and Korean diaspora. Learn about scholarships, courses and research, and connect with others.

We look forward to seeing you!

Please register to help us organize catering.

Wednesday, 20 November 2024 | 11:30 to 13:00 EST | 2nd Screening @ 3:00 p.m. | Sensorium Flex Space, Room 326, Joan and Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts, 86 Fine Arts Road, York University

Each year, numerous queer individuals from Asia immigrate to Canada where they seek socio-economic opportunities, freedom and authenticity in their lifestyles. However, their life experiences are often overshadowed by heteronormative narratives about Asian immigrants in Canadian media. This event comprises in-person presentations, an immersive film screening, and a Q&A session, aiming to generate conversations about Asian queer communities in Canada and promote transnational Asian Studies.

Presenters:
Tracy Ying Zhang: Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, York University
Ali Ghaedi Talkhouncheh: Media Artist, MFA in Film Production, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University
Ayse Irem Karabag: PhD Candidate, Department of English, York University.

Lunch will be served. Please RSVP by 18 November 2024 at this link.

Presented by the York Centre for Asian Research, Sensorium, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Department of Communication and Media Studies, and the Department of English.

For more information: ycar@yorku.ca

Thursday, 14 November 2024 | 11:30 to 13:30 EST | Virtually via Zoom

Koral Dasgupta, storyteller and founder of www.tellmeyourstory.biz, will be talking about the making of the Sati Series, a collection of works of mythological fiction (TheSatiSeries - KoralDasgupta) and lead the audience into a workshop on story telling and story receiving.

Stories of ancient culture were traditionally exploited to produce regressive narratives, endorsing macho men who control women. But when one consciously reads the poetry of ancient India, he/she can discover spiritual secrets that vastly differ from the popular belief or creative translations. 

Myth tells us that no one can be perfectly fair - not even God. The Indian epics introduce gorgeous men who are not afraid of women's talent and own their mistakes. They collide or collaborate with women in various ways, producing multi-layered results. Indian mythology philosophises about the harmony of masculine and feminine energies to restore peace and enhance productivity. Shiva-Shakti, for example, is a team. When Shiva is separated from Shakti, it results in Taandav. Shakti chanelizes Shiva, contrary to the popular conditioning that men should control women. Here again, lies the fundamentals of social injustice. 

Attendees can register at this link.

This event is presented with support from the York Centre for Asian Research.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024 | 09:00 to 11:00 EDT | Room 857, Eighth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University and virtually via Zoom

With Lwin Moe, York University

Respondent: Ye Min Tun, Adjunct Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Misinformation on Burmese social media has become a serious problem, fueling hate speech and violence, especially during the 2017 Rohingya genocide. Despite efforts by platforms like Facebook to restrain harmful content using AI and Burmese-speaking moderators, the lack of resources and fact checking datasets in Burmese remains a major obstacle. This paper addresses this challenge by creating a large fact checking dataset and NLP models for Burmese. Using a machine-translated version of the Fake News Challenge (FNC-1) dataset, named FNC-1B, three BERT-based classifiers were trained and evaluated. The best-performing model achieved 81\% accuracy on the translated FNC-1B dataset, and 79\% on a manually annotated Burmese dataset. This performance is comparable to that of the BERT model for fact checking in English, which yielded 82\% accuracy on the English version of the dataset. This research represents a crucial first step toward creating fact checking datasets and tools tailored to Burmese, which are essential for combating misinformation online. The results also show that language-specific pre-training for BERT models is critical in handling misinformation in low-resource languages like Burmese. Moreover, the study demonstrates that models trained on a translated dataset can effectively perform fact checking tasks in real-world Burmese contexts, offering a viable solution for mitigating the spread of false information online. 

This event is part of the Burma Past and Present: Religion, Ethnicity and Power, a series of readings and discussion of works in progress. We will be reading and discussing work in progress with the author. Please email hmlwin@yorku.ca to receive a copy of the reading.

This event is hybrid. Virtual attendees should register at this link.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024 | 14:00 to 16:30 EST | Room 305, Third Floor, York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University

With Mona Bhan, Syracuse University

In March 2019, the Indian government declared large hydropower to be a renewable source of energy. The move was designed to boost the industry's potential while recognizing hydropower's role in stabilizing an otherwise unstable national power grid. Only months after this decision, the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s autonomous constitutional status, making the militarily occupied region even more vulnerable to massive hydropower investments and to India's settler extractive logics. My presentation analyzes the political and material logics that co-produce hydropower as India’s “forever asset” and Kashmir as Hindu India’s eternal and timeless part. As claims of hydropower’s foreverness melded with India’s primordial links to Kashmir, the project of re-engineering nation and nature worked in concert to produce India’s contested sovereignty in Kashmir.

Mona Bhan is Professor of Anthropology and the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies at Syracuse University. She is a political and environmental anthropologist whose work on Indian-occupied Kashmir explores the role of economic and infrastructural development in counterinsurgency operations and people's resistance movements to protracted wars and settler occupation. Her areas of specialization include wars, militarism, and counterinsurgency; indigeneity and settler colonialism; race, gender and religion; ecocide and climate change; and military occupation and infrastructural policies. She is the author of Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? and Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (with Andrew Bauer).

With her colleagues from the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective that she helped co-found in 2013, she has co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, and the Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies. She has also co-edited special issues of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law (2017) and Critique of Anthropology (2020). Since 2022, as part of her Lender Fellowship for social justice (2022–24), Mona has been working with a team of undergraduate and graduate students to examine how Artificial Intelligence is reconfiguring the city of Syracuse, with a special attention on the ways in which AI has shaped surveillance and policing technologies, discourses of securitization, STEM education in city schools, and claims and counterclaims to citizenship.

This event is part of the following series: Demos, Democracy, Democratization: South Asia Lecture Series 2024–25 and Climate Dystopias in Asia.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024 | 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. | Eighth Floor Common Area, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University

The South Asia research cluster at the York Centre for Asian Research invites graduate scholars working on the broad area of South Asia and the diaspora to its first social gathering for the academic year. Graduate students are welcome to stop by and learn more about the cluster and its plans, which includes a graduate student colloquium, creative exhibits and more.

Refreshments will be served. Please register at this link.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024 | 14:00 to 17:00 EST | Sensorium Flex Space, Room 326, Joan & Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts (CFA),  Keele Campus, York University

Created by artists Kim Seo-Kyung and Kim Eun-Sung, the Statue of the Girl for Peace commemorates the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, often euphemistically called "comfort women," during the Asia-Pacific War from the early 1930s to 1945. An estimated 200,000 young girls and women from colonized and occupied regions were subjected to brutal exploitation.

The original statue was installed in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011, marking the 1,000th Wednesday Demonstration, a weekly protest by survivors and their supporters, seeking justice and redress for this historical atrocity. Since then, the Statue has become a powerful symbol of the redress movement, fostering alliances across generations and transcending national borders. Replicas have been installed in over 100 locations across Korea and globally, including Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States.

The empty chair beside her symbolizes both the absence of victims who have passed and the ongoing struggle for justice in unresolved war crimes. It extends an invitation for you to join in intergenerational and transnational solidarity against gender-based sexual violence.

This event is presented by mihyun maria kim, Nava Messas Waxman, Marc Nair, and Joshua D. Pilzer. It is organized by Hong Kal & Nava Messas Waxman.

Please register at this link.

mihyun maria kim is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, researching (un)translatable affects shaped by languages entangled with unresolved historical grief and transmissions of longing. Exhaustion of the body, repetition of movement, fragments of hi/stories, and suspended feelings are explored between memory and imagination across space and time. Through relational methodology, her multivocal outcomes take in/visible form in poetry, painting, performance/activations, audio/video, site-specific installation, community-based round tables and public art.  

Nava Messas-Waxman is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across performance, film and installation. Her practice engages themes of cultural identity, diaspora, liminality and memory. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at York University. Her current research explores the diasporic gesture as a dynamic living archive, embedded within complex artistic, cultural and personal registers. Messas-Waxman earned her MFA in Visual Arts from York University. She is a graduate research member at the n::D Studio Lab at York University and a graduate research associate at the Sensorium Research Center for Creative Inquiry and Experimentation at York University. Her recent projects include Assembly of Repair (2024), Shared-View (2022), and Variations on Broken Lines (2020). In 2019, she was honoured with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship (SSHRC) and has received several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Marc Nair is a poet, artist and educator from Singapore who is based in Toronto. He has 11 collections of poetry, three solo photography exhibitions and three spoken word albums. He is currently a creative writing mentor, freelance writer, and a fellow with the Asia-Europe Foundation. 

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012. His second book, Quietude, was published in 2022 and is an ethnography of the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their children, andwon the coveted Alan Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority.

Hong KAL is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University. She is an author of Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Routledge 2011), and currently working on visual representations of violence, trauma and grief in South Korea.

This event is supported by the School of Arts, Media, Performance, and Design (AMPD); Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology; York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR); and Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024 | 14:30 to 16:30 EST | Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library | Eighth Floor, 130 St. George Street, Toronto

The Seventh Bernard H.K. Luk Memorial Lecture in Hong Kong Studies
with Denise Y. Ho, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

What does Hong Kong history look like at its borders?  This talk examines the experiences of three figures whose life and work traversed Hong Kong’s border with China, focusing on the period from the establishment of the People’s Republic to the early years of China’s era of “reform and opening-up.” The Deep Bay oysterman inherited a complex system of ownership and an ecologically sensitive industry; over the years he had to navigate the complexity of the Cold War on the “Bamboo Curtain” as well as the threats of the Cultural Revolution. The New Territories farmer who held land at and across the border with China also had to deal with the political campaigns that collectivized agriculture; local officials on both sides attempted to maintain the status quo despite contested claims exacerbated by refugee flight. Finally, the marine policeman had to patrol the liminal boundaries of Hong Kong’s territorial waters, both agent and witness to the human impact of local and international political events. The collective biographies of these three figures call our attention to the contingency and porosity of the border, to the effect of the global on the local, and to the centrality of the margins.   

Denise Y. Ho 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 (Cambridge 2018) and a co-editor (with Jennifer Altehenger) of Material Contradictions in Mao’s China (University of Washington 2022). Ho is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Nation’s Gate: A Cross-Border History of Hong Kong and China. Ho received her PhD from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty of Georgetown, she taught at Yale University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Kentucky.

This event is organized the Organizing Committee of the Bernard H.K. Luk Memorial Lecture in Hong Kong Studies at the York Centre for Asian Research and co-sponsored and hosted by the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library.

Please register at this link before 11 November 2024.

Monday, 11 November 2024 | 17:00 to 19:00 EST | Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library | Eighth Floor, 130 St. George Street, Toronto

With Denise Y. Ho, Georgetown University

How does one come to the study of Hong Kong? 

What can Hong Kong contribute to the study of border history, Chinese history, and global history? 

These two questions animate this informal discussion for graduate students and recent graduates across disciplines. Participants are encouraged to read the paper titled "Locating the Archive of the Hong Kong–China Borderland" (which will be sent to workshop registrants) before the workshop to be ready to share their own background and experience. The speaker will share her own journey, discuss some of the challenges of doing border history, and lead a broader discussion on Hong Kong in various academic disciplines. 

Denise Y. Ho 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 (Cambridge 2018) and a co-editor (with Jennifer Altehenger) of Material Contradictions in Mao’s China (University of Washington 2022). Ho is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Nation’s Gate: A Cross-Border History of Hong Kong and China. She has published many public writings on Hong Kong when she lived there. Ho received her BA from Yale College and her MA and PhD from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty of Georgetown, she taught at Yale University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Kentucky.

Please register at this link.

This event is organized by the York Centre for Asian Research and sponsored by the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto.

Thursday, 07 November 2024 | 16:00 to 18:00 EST | Room 325, Student Centre, 4700 Keele Street, York University

DID YOU KNOW 200,000+ former international students face mass deportation or loss of status because their work permits are expiring in 2024–25.

With the grassroots organization Naujawan Support Network (NSN)

Moderated by Tania Das Gupta (School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies)

Please register in advance using this link.

Co-presented by: York Graduate Student Association (YUGSA), CUPE 3903, Sikh Student Association (SSA), First-Generation Immigrant Students (FGIS), and the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR)

For more information email: rsidhu96[at]yorku.ca