Speaker 
Gao Shiyi (Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
GAO Shiyi is a Ph.D candidate with the Department of Anthropology in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include anthropology of sports, gender studies with a particular focus on masculinity, and ethnicities in southwest China. She is a hardcore Chelsea fan as well.

In this talk, I will explore masculinity, as expressed through football in Lijiang, a Naxi-dominated city in southwest China. Chinese minority ethnic groups have often been depicted in the anthropological literature in feminine terms; but in this talk I discuss the distinctly masculine side of the Naxi in the serious business of football. Typically, a professional footballer is supposed to display his muscular physicality and economic success by showcasing his loyalty and honor to his team and by supporting his family as a breadwinner. In Lijiang, however, a crisis in masculinity was apparent among almost every footballer I knew.

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, I discuss in this talk the football journeys of young Naxi men who pursue professional careers. This ethnography consists of two parts. For those young talents migrating to elite football clubs elsewhere, I show that a sense of failure and frustration mainly lies in the rigors of their daily training and the uncertainties of potential personal injury. For those who are stuck in the bankrupt hometown team at a lower tier, I argue that they have hidden their anxieties and vulnerabilities by adopting a hyper-masculine lifestyle, disguising the social and economic inequality they are victims of.

All interested are welcome.
A light lunch will be served at 12:45 pm. First come, first served.

Plotinus and Wang Bi, the nominal founders of what are sometimes retrospectively called Neo-Platonism and Neo-Daoism respectively, lived at the same time, on opposite sides of the globe. Both were seminal thinkers, whose work set the agenda for much of the philosophical speculation done over the next thousand-plus years in their respective traditions. In this presentation I will consider the tropes of oneness, nonbeing, intelligibility and omnipresence in their thought, exploring both the apparent similarities and the salient structural differences, focusing especially on the impact these differences. Is oneness as a synonym for being and the essence of determinacy, or is oneness a structuring lack? Is nonbeing precisely indeterminacy, matter and evil, while also creeping dangerously into the definition of the transcendent One, or is nonbeing the omnipresent indeterminacy that serves as the condition of possibility for all being? Is determinate intelligibility the closest approximation available for transcendent oneness, or is it a reverse image of localized indeterminacies? Is determinacy or indeterminacy what is omnipresent? These are the questions to be explored. Of special interest will be the problem of identity of indiscernibles in Plotinus’s treatment of Matter and the One, and whether Wang Bi’s approach to parallel questions, on entirely different premises, presents a viable alternative.
 

Speaker
Prof. Brook Ziporyn
Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought, The University of Chicago
Vice-Chancellor Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUHK

Online
No registration is required
Meeting ID: 988 2214 0092
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/98822140092

Face-to-face
Register by 30 Nov 2023
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13678778

This dissertation research investigates literature on Islam in modern China, particularly since the beginning of the reform and opening period. As part of the research project “The Modern Religious Bookshelf: Canons, Concepts and Communities”, the study focuses on the organization of literature, paying attention to actors and networks engaged in literary practices like classification, publication and circulation. In short, the research scrutinizes what kind of knowledge on Islam was produced and how this knowledge became manifest in the prints filling Chinese bookshelves.
 

Speaker
Mr. Anton Terhechte
Hon. Research Assistant, Centre for the Study of Islamic Culture, CUHK
PhD Candidate, Free University of Berlin

No need for registration. Seats are provided on a first-come-first-served basis.

How did architects and artists in the Renaissance view the world, and where did they derive inspiration for their designs? Did people of the past see in the same way we do, or did vision and the creative imagination differ in an age before computers and digital screens? This talk will discuss how the discipline of art history can address these questions through the analysis of Renaissance buildings and artworks in their original cultural and political context.

Speaker 
Prof. Morgan NG
Department of the History of Art, Yale University

In this presentation, Richard will revisit the histories of modern Yangzi Delta (Jiangnan 江南) by focusing on the perspectives from the underclass fishers in inland water peripheries. For centuries, Jiangnan has been the primary socio-political and economic core of China with the most developed hydraulic systems. Yet it remains unclear how such hydraulic mis/management impacted the shoreline ecosystems and thus reshaped the local societies. Richard’s research historicizes these anthropogenic consequences after the mid-nineteenth century by emphasizing the considerable population spreading along rivers, canals, and lakes—with a central focus on the understudied boat-dwelling communities in Lake Tai (Taihu 太湖). Richard will illustrate how much the changing riverine surroundings created a liminal sphere for these mobile groups by informing their social patterns and cultural identities distinct from the land-based societies. Most of these drifting people remain poor and illiterate so unable to leave written sources; nevertheless, their religious practices—Catholicism in particular— provide first-hand data to recover their hidden voices from below. Drawing on newly released hydrographical data, missionary documents, and my ethnographical fieldwork of oral interviews with rural fishing Catholics who still lived on boats until the early 2000s, this study forms a dialogue with the given historical and governmental archives regarding authority-based narratives in securing the waters. By bridging water environments and localized Christianity, it aims to unpack the historical processes in forming the social margins of modern Jiangnan.
 

Speaker 
Yu-Cheng Shih
Yu-Cheng Shih, also named Richard, is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Brown University with inter-disciplinary training between history, anthropology, and digital mapping. As an environmental historian working on inland water dynamics in modern China, his research combines environmental humanities and local societies to investigate histories of migration and refugees; natural calamities, diseases, and Anthropocene; and politics of belonging across Taiwan, China, and East Asia. He is currently visiting the Centre of China Studies in the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Speaker: Mr. LIU, Zelan, Ph.D. Candidate of Department of the Fine Arts, CUHK

ZOOM meeting ID: 913 2308 0481 (Passcode: 904206)
 

The vast production of waste and garbage on a global scale is the shameful secret of our contemporary civilization, what preferably we all seek to keep "in the dark," when throwing trash away unthinkingly during our daily lives. And yet, the trash we leave behind in the form of plastics, chemicals, and other "epic waste," with a longevity exceeding tens of thousands of years, will come to define who are as a species. In the age of the Anthropocene, we have become homo detritus. The paradox of the Age of the Anthropocene, as I shall examine his this talk, is that while modernity has forgone the idea of immortality, our contemporary world is materially dependent on the social and technological production of "immortality," not, however, as Classically envisioned, in terms of "great memorable deeds and actions," "enduring scientific discoveries," or "universal values," but through the production of "epic waste" (plastics, nuclear waste, etc.). What kind of cultural artefact is waste and garbage? How does the production of "epic waste" reconfigure the relation between time and eternity? How does this focus on waste in the Anthropocene challenge attempts to re-think "the ethical" in view of an imperative towards the future, the future of all futures?
 

Speaker
Prof. Nicolas de Warren
Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, the Pennsylvania State University

Online
No registration is required
Meeting ID: 938 0232 7333
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/93802327333

Face-to-face
Register by 23 Nov 2023
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13678398

This article suggests that there has been a decline in attention paid to issues of linguistic difference and translation in ethnography and examines the theoretical trends in anthropology associated with this decline.. It analyzes problems in ethnographic contexts where Chinese to English translation (particularly in the translation of various words related to the English semantic domain of “happiness”), have implications for social life, as well as the recent theoretical trends in the discipline that encourage ethnographers to ignore linguistic structure. Utilizing Actor Network Theory and anthropological theorizations of translation, it argues that linguistic structure must be conceived as a significant force in the world and that it must be understood as interacting with other forces in the world.
 

Speaker
Andrew B. Kipnis (Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Andrew Kipnis is Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His latest book is The Funeral of Mr. Wang (University of California Press, 2021).

*A light lunch will be served at 12:45 pm. First come, first served.

Speaker 
Professor Kevin W. H. Tai
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education
The University of Hong Kong
Professor Kevin W. H. Tai is Assistant Professor of English Language Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education (CAISE) at the Faculty of Education in The University of Hong Kong. Additionally, he is Honorary Research Fellow at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society in University College London (UCL). He was recently awarded the RGC Early Career Award (ECA) in 2023/24 from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong and the Faculty Early Career Research Output Award from the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong for recognising his excellent achievements in research. In relation to his editorial positions, Kevin Tai is Editor of The Language Learning Journal (ESCI-listed Journal; Routledge), Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (SSCI-listed Journal; Routledge) and Managing Guest Editor of Learning and Instruction (SSCI-listed Journal; Elsevier). His research interests include: language education policy, classroom discourse, translanguaging in multilingual contexts and qualitative research methods (particularly Multimodal Conversation Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Linguistic Ethnography). Kevin Tai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Abstract
Translanguaging is an emerging concept within the Applied Linguistics and Language Education field, and it has the potential to promote equity and social justice. As a theory of language, translanguaging encourages both teachers and students to utilize their diverse multilingual and multimodal resources. This approach challenges traditional configurations, categories, and power structures in language education, aiming to equalize the hierarchy of languages in the classroom and facilitate students' active participation in constructing new meanings and language practices.

In this presentation, I aim to broaden our comprehension of an English Medium Instruction (EMI) classroom as an integrated translanguaging space, which involves various fluid and mobile translanguaging sub-spaces. I will present EMI classroom video data that illustrates the process of engaging students affords the EMI history teacher to create different translanguaging sub-spaces at a whole-class level and at an individual level. It is argued that creating these translanguaging sub-spaces requires the history teacher to mobilise available resources for catering for the different needs of all students, which promotes interaction and inclusion in the classrooms.

This conference on Translation Studies and Digital Humanities, organized by the Centre for Translation Technology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, aims to explore the extent to which translation studies has already embraced the digital, showcase exciting and original research, expand our digital horizons by learning about the work of practitioners in other areas, and discuss possible pitfalls and shortcomings of digital approaches, as well as potential benefits and opportunities.