News & Events

The Lackluster Past and Promising Future of China’s Central Bank Digital Currency

China’s slow adoption of its central bank digital currency, e-CNY, suggests existing electronic payments systems can be a deterrent.

India and Vietnam Attract Global Capital, Emerge as Strong Investment Hubs in Asia

With growing venture capital investments and private equity deals, India and Vietnam are positioned to become prime choices for international capital.

The Emerging Market of Cryptocurrencies and Perpetual Contracts

Cryptocurrencies have attracted much attention from the public. In the cryptocurrency space, perpetual contracts play a crucial role.

May 6, 2024: Why Don’t Indian Voters Hold Politicians Accountable For Air Pollution? at Uris Hall

Talk by Tariq Thachil (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)

Urban citizens in low-income democracies rarely hold elected officials accountable for toxic air. To understand why, we fielded a large citizen survey in Delhi, India, a highly polluted megacity where voters rarely prioritize air pollution at the polls. We find no evidence of conventional explanations for accountability failures: residents are aware of pollution’s adverse impacts, do not privilege development over curbing emissions, and are not fractured along class or ethnic lines on this issue. Instead, we find partisanship and sensitivity to the potential private costs of mitigation policies reduce accountability pressures. On the other hand, a simple randomized intervention (sharing indoor air quality information) that personalizes the costs of air pollution increases its electoral salience. We reveal key opportunities and constraints for mobilizing public opinion to reduce air pollution in developing democracies.

Tariq Thachi is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI), and Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent book (coauthored with Adam Auerbach), Migrants and Machine Politics, focuses on the political lives of poor migrants in Indian cities. His first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India. He received his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2009.

View on site | Email this event

May 4, 2024: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis at Physical Sciences Building

Day 2: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis

About this workshop:

As the world enters its fourth year living with COVID-19, this workshop critically examines our conceptual tools for capturing this chronic crisis and its seismic impact on global geopolitics and humanistic inquiry. Departing from existing discussions, we focus on how the diverse media practices that flourished during the pandemic are now transforming into historical and aesthetic archives enabling re-readings of overshadowed affects, stories, and relationalities within a larger picture. With a special interest in transregional, diasporic, global, and/or other innovative frameworks of analysis, we seek to address the controversial yet indispensable role of China and Chineseness in constituting the global political ecology of this crisis period. Discussion topics include but are not limited to (post-)pandemic global politics and sociality, crisis temporalities, media forms and platforms, ordinary agency, archive, transregional world-making, soundscapes, ecocriticism, and ongoing changes in Chinese/Sinophone/Asian/Asian American studies.

We invite all interested to join us for this get-together for creative and convivial thinking.

10:00-10:10 Welcome Remarks

10:10-11:50 Panel 1: ARCHIVE

Fanyi Faye Ma (Duke University): Can Digital Wailing Crumble the Zero-COVID Great Wall?: The Political Lives of Mediated Female VoiceNick Admussen (Cornell University): The Postpandemic, the Postsocialist, and Jile Disike (Disco Elysium)Lilian Kong (University of Chicago): Calibrating the Self: Approaching East Asian Healing Vlogs as Digital Pandemic ArchiveShana Ye (University of Toronto): The Pandemic Steel(Still): Materiality, Memory and the Many Lives of Chinese Cargo Containers1:30-3:10 Panel 2: REWORLDING

Yanting-Leah Li (Cornell University): From Immunity to Superabundance: Radical Possibilities of Communitarian EcologyShiqi Lin (Cornell University) and Hans Yi Su (Pennsylvania State University): Pandemic Clubbing: Fugitive Cohabitation in a Shifting Global OrderChristopher T. Fan (University of California, Irvine): Park My Car: Ambiguity and the Auteur in the Films of Chung Mong-hongLily Wong (American University): Transpacific Alliance: Asian/American Coalitional World-Making in and beyond the Pandemic3:20-4:50 Hybrid Roundtable: RECALIBRATION

A special discussion bringing back scholars who have written about COVID-19 since 2020

Michael Berry (UCLA), Jenny Chio (University of Southern California), Belinda Kong (Bowdoin College), Carlos Rojas (Duke University), Kaiyang Xu (University of Southern California)Moderators: Nick Admussen and Shiqi Lin5:00-5:30 Concluding Discussion

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Read about Day 1's book talk here.

View on site | Email this event

May 3, 2024: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis at Goldwin Smith Hall

Day 1: Book Talk – SARS Stories: Affect and Archive of the 2003 Pandemic

Speaker: Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)

In SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows how the Chinese experiences of living with SARS can reshape global feelings toward pandemic social life and foster greater fellowship in the face of pandemics.

Belinda Kong is Professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is a scholar of global Asian literature and culture whose research focuses on global Chinese-ness.

Book discount: save 30% when you order SARS Stories from dukeupress.edu with coupon code E24BKONG.

Day 1's book talk is part of a two-day workshop. Read about Day 2 here.

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Conveners:

Shiqi Lin (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Nick Admussen (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Participants:

Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA)

Jenny Chio (East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, USC)

Christopher T. Fan (English, UC Irvine)

Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)

Lilian Kong (Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

Yanting-Leah Li (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Fanyi Faye Ma (Ethnomusicology, Duke University)

Carlos Rojas (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)

Hans Yi Su (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)

Lily Wong (Literature, American University)

Kaiyang Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC)

Shana Ye (Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto)

View on site | Email this event