Professor Max Tang, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, warmly welcomed and introduced Mr. Liu to an audience of over 400 attendees, including CUHK students, alumni, staff, and community members. We trust that everyone found Mr. Liu's presentation both enlightening and engaging.
 

We also extend special thanks to Professor Donna Chu, Director of the School of Journalism and Communication at CUHK, for her expert moderation of the Q&A session, as well as to our audience for their active participation in fostering a thoughtful discussion.
 

The Faculty of Arts will continue to organise more exciting academic and cultural events. Please stay tuned for our announcements.

Opening Ceremony
The opening ceremony will feature a captivating Filipino folk dance and a dazzling catwalk show showcasing traditional costumes from various cultures.

Cultural Booths
Presented by non-local students at CUHK and the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, the vibrant cultural booths will take you on a culinary journey through Central Asia, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Spain, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam, allowing you to explore their unique cultural tapestries.

At the booths, you can enjoy complimentary regional snacks, play fun games, learn about different languages, appreciate various art forms, and most importantly, interact with the students and staff representing these regions! There will be so much more to discover!

Additionally, don’t miss the chance to grab attractive souvenirs!

Date:
31 October 2024 (Thursday)
Opening Ceremony:
12:00pm to 12:30pm
Cultural Booths:
12:00pm to 3:00pm
Venue:
Cultural Square (in front of Benjamin Franklin Centre)
 

All are welcome. No registration is required. 

Japanologists at universities are engaged in intensive research, teaching, administration and external engagement. We are so overwhelmed by increasing tasks in these crucial areas of work and often forget our crucial mission. This presentation attempts to consider the importance and mission of Japanologists, sharing my 40-year-long career in Japanese Studies.

Speaker 
Prof. MITO Takamichi
MITO Takamichi, Tam Mito, a graduate of International Christian University and University of Tsukuba, Japan, is an expert of International Political Economy and has taught Japanese Studies at leading universities including CUHK, Cambridge, SOAS/London, Monash, Kyushu, Lund, Harvard, Southern Methodist, Waseda and Kwansei Gakuin Universities.

Lee Erisu, frequently designated as the "Diva of the Century," was among the initial popular vocalists and Shinpa actresses in Korea during the Japanese colonial period, following the release of her 1927 recording of "Ruins of Hwangsŏng." She recorded a variety of popular songs in both Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea, thereby establishing herself as a cultural icon of inter-Asian colonial modernity. The legendary recital of "Ruins of Hwangsŏng" in 1933 prompted collective mourning for lost sovereignty, functioning as a metonymy of "ruined country" and evoking anti-Japanese patriotism. Moreover, Lee Erisu's presence exemplified the modern woman figure and the concept of free love. In 1932, at the zenith of her renown, Lee Erisu receded from public view and rumoured to take her own life with a married man with whom she was infatuated. After 75 years of disappearance, she was found in a sanatorium in 2008, but was severely disoriented and in a state of advanced age, at the age of 98. The nature of her relationship to the colonial past was becoming increasingly obscure. This research, which is a study of cultural memory of the colonial period, focuses on Lee Erisu’s life trajectory, the colonial structure of the phonograph industry and its cultural discourse in relation to addressing the embedded structures of Japanese colonialism, and the impact of Lee’s stardom on socio-cultural morals and values, as well as the invention of a new modern female subjectivity. This talk attempts to elucidate hitherto untouched narratives of Lee Erisu’s career and music. This talk aims to elucidate the various discourses of acoustic modernity, the concept of modern free love as ambivalent senses of desire and reversion, and the accounts of the audience’s reception of her music as both passive resistance to and ambivalent desire for colonial modernity.

Speaker 
Prof. Yongwoo Lee
Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK

I investigate null arguments in Eastern Tamang, showing that null objects arise by argument ellipsis (AE) and that null subjects arise by pro. It is well known that Japanese allows AE in both subject and object position, while Chinese appears to allow AE only in object position (Huang 1984; Huang 1991; Oku 1998; Saito 2007). Takahashi (2014) argues that this asymmetry follows from the presence of abstract subject agreement in Chinese and its absence in Japanese. Sato (2019) rejects this approach and argues that the lack of AE in Chinese follows from the fact that subjects in Chinese are obligatorily topics and that AE arises by LF copy. Neither approach works for the facts below. Instead, I argue that PF deletion is responsible for AE in Eastern Tamang. It will be shown that null subjects have a strict reading only while null objects have a strict or sloppy reading. Takahashi (2014) argues for abstract subject agreement in Chinese based on blocking effects in long-distance anaphora, but such blocking effects are absent in Tamang. Turning to Sato’s (2019) analysis, we see that his proposal rests on the fact that overt subjects in Chinese are topics and that AE arises by LF copy. Indefinite subjects are possible in Eastern Tamang, however, and indefinite nominals cannot be topics. Null subjects are instances of pro, while null objects are instances of AE arising by PF copy deletion.

Speaker
Professor Michael Barrie
Professor Michael Barrie is a professor in the English Department at Sogang University, Soul, Korea. He is interested in syntactic theory, the syntax-semantics interface and the syntax-prosody interface. His work covers a diverse range of languages, including Iroquoian, Algonquian, English, Cantonese, Korean, Tamang, Tagalog, Mongolian, and Romance languages. One of his notable works is his 2021 monograph Dynamic Antisymmetry and the Syntax of Noun Incorporation. Professor Barrie also serves as the research director for The Journal of Studies in Language, as a chief editor for the book series Studies in Generative Grammar, and as an editorial member in many other prestigious journals (e.g., Korean Journal of Linguistics, The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, and Cadian Journal of Linguistics).

Posthumanism and the figure of the cyborg are tied to the media history of the US. How would non-Western visions differ?

The talk features two contributions, one on the Soviet Union and another on China, on the scientific developments that inform artificial intelligence today.

Co-organized by the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme, the Centre for Cultural Studies, and the Research Institute for the Humanities, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Speaker
Dr. Vladimir Lukin
Dr. Vladimir Lukin, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Duke University, specialist in soviet media history.

Prof. Xuenan Cao
Prof. Xuenan Cao, Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, critical AI and media scholar.

Understanding how public health discourse evolves in response to increased scrutiny or societal changes is essential to help democracies develop effective strategies to counteract potentially harmful effects. This study examines the temporal dimension of how this type of public discourse evolves conceptually. The use case is the Italian discourse on Twitter related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, a vaccine that has been at the centre of anti-vaccination campaigns for several years (Kornides et al.. 2023; Chen et al. 2021; Calo et al. 2021; Massey et al. 2020). Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) theory and using bi-grams, graph analysis, and the Girvan-Newman community detection method (Girvan and Newman 2002), the study maps how changes in the HPV discourse are manifested through hashtags in Italian tweets from 2012 to 2024. The assumption is that hashtags can be interpreted as cultural products (Weller et al.. 2013; Zappavigna 2012; 2016; La Rocca 2019) and that these cultural products can offer important insights into the concepts users have associated with the HPV vaccine over the past twelve years as well as answer questions of discourse proliferation and awareness. The results show a significant conceptual change. While in the years 2012-2020, the Italian HPV discourse on Twitter was mostly concerned with virus awareness and vaccine advocacy, in the years 2020-2024 anti-vaccination narratives not only spiked but they almost entirely replaced the initial discourse.

In this talk, Dr. Viola will explore how public health discourse—specifically related to the HPV vaccine on Twitter in Italy—has evolved from 2012 to 2024. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis and various analytical methods, her presentation examines the role of hashtags as cultural products that reflect societal attitudes. The findings indicate a significant shift: from 2012 to 2020, discussions focused on virus awareness and vaccine support; however, from 2020 to 2024, anti-vaccination narratives surged, nearly dominating the conversation. Understanding this evolution is crucial for democracies to develop effective strategies against harmful public health misinformation.

Speaker 
Dr Lorella Viola
Dr Lorella Viola is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities & Society at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In her research, she develops innovative digital humanities methodologies to investigate how power, latent assumptions and implicit ideologies are manifested through language and circulated in media and society. She also researches the impact of the digital transformation of society on knowledge creation theory and practice.

Food is a crucial part of life. Not only does food sustain us physically, but the acts of acquiring, preparing and eating food allow us to make statements about who we are, our identity(s) and thus to shape our interactions on a daily basis. Despite this, food remains an elusive element of archaeology, often because of an unwillingness to approach it analytically - we typically stop at 'diet' rather than food as a concept. In this presentation the basics of archaeobotany, the study of plant remains from archaeological sites will be introduced, and how new theoretical and methodological approaches are delving into the realm of food and challenging us to think about this tricky subject. Case studies from South Asia will be used to illustrate how, with careful consideration of the material, we can go beyond the agricultural or dietary implications of variation in plant presence to look at how people perceived ‘food’ as a social material. The main case study will be the Indus Civilisation (c.3200-1500BC), though a few other examples from across the subcontinent will also be shown to add some 'flavour' to the paper. The Indus Civilisation was one of the largest old world Bronze Age civilisations, covering modern day Pakistan and northern India, extending into Afghanistan. The Indus consisted of five large urban sites and thousands of smaller settlements, with a shared material culture, including red and black ceramic style, stamp seals, ‘script’, and use of semi-precious stones like carnelian and lapis lazuli. The Indus was also part of vast trading networks, linking it to Mesopotamia, Oman, Bahrain and beyond. As a result of its geographic extent and the wide range of environmental regions it encompassed, the Indus was a hotbed of agricultural experimentation. However, this agricultural variation was also due to its location at the cross roads of trade, bringing it into contact with a wide variety of potential ingredients. These included indigenous small millets and tropical pulses and more exotic crops from China such as rice, African millets, and Eurasian crops like wheat, barley, peas and lentils. This paper will show that with some nuanced analysis, food can be used to think about urbanism, rural staples and exotic luxuries, and how these link into models of Indus identity, social organisation and trade.

Speaker 
Jennifer Bates
Department of Archaeology and Art History, Seoul National University

Jennifer Bates is Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science at Seoul National University, South Korea. She specialises in the archaeobotany of South Asia, with interests in questions relating to food use, agricultural systems development, domestication, environment and climate change. Her primary research is currently focused on rice domestication and early agriculture in the Ganges plains, with a collaborative 6 year project, the Indica Project, run with BHU India to explore this. Prof. Bates is also leading the Korean Working Group of LandCover6k, a global effort to improve Anthropogenic Land Cover Change models used in climate predictions.

AI ethics and governance strive to maximize the social benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing its adverse effects. Behavioral science contributes to this effort through at least three research families, which I will illustrate during this conference. The 'moral machine' approach seeks to measure what people want machines to do when machines make ethical decisions. The 'machine behavior' approach seeks to measure what machines do, when their moral behavior is unpredictable enough that it must be studied with methods we use to study humans. The 'machine culture' approach seeks to measure the impact of machines on the moral behavior of humans. Examples will include autonomous vehicles, lie-detection algorithms, and delegation to machine subordinates.

Speaker
Prof. Jean-François Bonnefon
CNRS Research Director,
Director, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse,
Director, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Toulouse School of Economics

 📅 9:00am-6:00pm｜19 October, 2024 (Saturday)
 📍 Esther Lee Building and University Mall, CUHK

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