Michigan

[CFP] 2016 International Conference of NextGen Korean Studies Scholars

Graduate students in Korean studies are invited to participate in the 4th International Conference of NextGen Korean Studies Scholars (NEKST) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Any methodologies and disciplinary traditions are welcome for submission, as long as the proposed paper topic is specific to Korea. Abstracts are due by January 15, 2016.… more

CFP: Conference on “cultures of Yushin,” University of Michigan

Moving beyond the era’s political economy, the conference on “Cultures of Yushin” seeks to explore the remarkably rich and varied cultural production of the Yushin period in its dynamic, and often ambivalent, relationship to state power. Cultural production is broadly conceived to include literature, film, television, theater, music, art, architecture, animation, comics, advertising, fashion, and sports. We welcome innovative research that complicates familiar terms of opposition between coercion and consent, collaboration and resistance, and high art and popular culture.… more

Barbarians, Monsters, Hybrids and Mutants: Asian Inventions of Human “Others”, University of Michigan,

When and under what circumstances do people invent the concept of the other? This question has been posed and responded to many times over in a largely modern, colonial, Eurocentric context. However, the invention of others is not simply a European prerogative: it is a practice common to cultures and societies throughout the world, past and present. This timely symposium proposes to examine these issues in a visually rich, historically grounded and contextualized collection of talks and discussions that focus critical analytic attention on the manifold Asian imagination and invention of others. We seek to highlight and examine the robust and visually potent technologies of othering deployed in Asia by Asians past and present while addressing the multiple contexts, regional variations, and sets of interests, involved. In this way, we can focus both multi-media representations of “others” and on how and why these variable constructions were mobilized around complex cross- and intra-cultural negotiations over time.… more