This paper draws on 18 months of fieldwork undertaken in the cities of Yogyakarta and Jakarta in 2014-15, mostly with warias (one Indonesian transgender population) belonging to the urban poor. Central to the presentation is an ethnographic account of a project I undertook with warias to make organisational membership cards that closely mimicked the authentic state-issued identity card. These cards were, however, not designed to replace the authentic state identity card but reworked its powers of recognition to new ends.. Rather than an individual aligning with an identity that somehow lay within themselves (a view that state officials and many warias considered irrelevant or unusual) ethnographic attention to warias engagement with bureaucratic documents in exchanges with state officials revealed gender as but one sign which prompted a reckoning with the broader semiotic instability of state citizenship. Ethnographic research reveals that, contra Ariella Azoulay's claim that the state expands its sovereignty through images such as bureaucratic portrait photographs, identity cards and other documents can circulate in more unruly and creative ways. Reconsidering bureaucratic documents on semiotic and material terms helps to understand how the symbols of the state are not stable, but are themselves vulnerable to the open-endedmeanings of signs.
 

Speaker 
Benjamin Hegarty (Global Health Program, Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales)
Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, science and technology studies, and global health. He is the author of The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia, published by Cornell University Press. He is a Senior Research Associate in Global Health Equity and Justice at the Kirby Institute at UNSW.

Zoom meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92574749477 
Meeting ID: 925 7474 9477
Passcode: 395684

Earlier this March, our students from Department of Translation took home 1st Prize and 2nd Prize at the 4th Hong Kong Regional Final of the 9th Cross-Strait Interpreting Contest! The contest gathered 15 contestants from five universities in Hong Kong. Sunny Luk (MA in TRA) and Issac Lee (UG Year 4) won the 1st Prize and Qiyang Zhang (MA in TRA) won the 2nd Prize. Sunny and Issac will represent Hong Kong to compete with the other winners from Taiwan, Mainland China and Macau in the 9th Cross-Strait Interpreting Contest held in Macau this May.

Heartfelt congratulations to our students again for their exceptional performances and we look forward to their good news in the Final of the 9th Cross-Strait Interpreting Contest!

Group photo (from L to R):

Prof. Ye Jia, Visiting Assistant Professor of The City University of Hong Kong
Qiyang Zhang, Student of CUHK Translation (MA in TRA)
Issac Lee, Student of CUHK Translation (TRA/Year 4)
Sunny Luk, Student of CUHK Translation (MA in TRA)
Prof. Sophie Wei, Associate Professor of CUHK Translation
Ms. Jiang Hong, Part-time Lecturer of CUHK Translation

Conner is renowned for her platinum print landscapes that she produces with a 7”x17” format banquet camera. She was awarded two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships (1984 and 1985) which she spent photographing in China.

She will be sharing her journey on photographing China with the CUHK community, engaging with fellow artists, and exploring the city to capture its many unique facets.

For more event information, please visit https://bit.ly/3ZgnYtk
About Lois Conner and her works, please visit https://www.loisconner.net/info
 

Speaker
Lucretia Ho 何敏文 (Actress of Such a Girl Like Me 像我這樣的一個女子, 2012)
Lau Kok-rui 劉國瑞 (Director of Let’s Get Lost 九號公路, 2017)
Antonio Tam 譚善揚 (Director of Anatomy of Rats 群鼠, 2022)

For updates and more info, please visit:
https://www.facebook.com/CCSFilmScreenings

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is an experimental paradigm that has been frequently adopted to test hypotheses of inductive language learning biases, which are assumed to be part of the unconscious, perhaps also innate, linguistic knowledge. However, previous AGL studies demonstrating some biased language learning for adult learners rarely supported their findings by measuring learners' awareness and took it for granted that target generalizations are acquired unconsciously with guidance of their implicit linguistic knowledge. Without awareness measures, there's always an alternative interpretation of adult learners' performance given the fact that adult learners frequently, if not always, rely on explicit learning, too. In this talk, my goal is to show how reaction time of grammaticality judgments and elicited productions in AGL studies could be used as an objective index of adult learners' awareness, which could help shed light on the nature of acquired linguistic knowledge and reach a more solid conclusion regarding hypothesized language learning biases.

Speaker
Professor Tsung-Yin CHEN (National Tsing Hua University)
Tsung-Ying Chen received his PhD in Linguistics in 2014 from the Department of Linguistics of the University of Alberta in Canada. He worked in Taiwan as a postdoc researcher at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics of National Chung Cheng University between 2015 and 2017 before joining the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of National Tsing Hua University as a full-time faculty member in Fall 2017. Dr. Chen’s research interests cover theoretical and experimental phonology as well as language acquisition in general, and in more recent years, his works have concentrated on testing linguistic hypotheses experimentally with the artificial grammar learning paradigm.

This lecture examines the history and role of museum and court collections in defining and representing ideas of power and nationhood. Beginning with a history and analysis of court art collections in Europe and Asia, the formation, contents and functions of collections such as those of the Medici princes and the Qianlong court will be considered from the perspective of audiences and viewers. The lecture then considers the development of government spaces that were open to the public by design, in the form of national museums that first emerged in Britain in the 18th century, alongside Enlightenment ideas about knowledge and public education. The important role such museums played and continue to play in defining national identities will be explored, revealing the often tangled politics of display and representation in the museum space.

 

Speaker 
Prof. Stacey Pierson, Professor of the History of Chinese Ceramics at SOAS, University of London
Prof. Stacey Pierson is Professor of the History of Chinese Ceramics at SOAS, University of London. In addition to teaching and supervising research students in the School of Arts, she is President of the Oriental Ceramic Society (London) and series editor for the Routledge title Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1550-1950. Previously, from 1995 – 2007, she was Curator of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese art, also at the University of London, which housed the world-renowned Percival David collection of Chinese ceramics. She has published widely on aspects of Chinese ceramics and the history of collecting and exhibitions, including Collectors, Collections and Museums: the Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain: 1560-1960 (2007), Chinese Ceramics: a Design History (2009), From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain (2013), Private Collecting, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Art History in London: the Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1866-1950 (2017) and the edited volume Visual, Material and Textual Cultures of Food and Drink in China, 200 BCE – 1900 CE (2022), Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia, no. 25 (2022). Her most recent research project focused on Dr. Johnson’s Chinese teapot, which is on display in the British Museum.

The goal of Day of Digital Humanities (DH) is to bring together participants to reflect on the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” To do this, participants will attend a lecture to be given by Keynote speaker, Professor Donald Sturgeon, creator and administrator of Chinese Text Project (ctext.org) and Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Durham University (UK). Followed by a guided tour at the Digital Scholarship Lab and the MakerSpace 3-D printing Lab. After lunch, participants will form into groups to take part in a half-day hackathon, a fun, easy and rewarding data scraping competition.

Targets: University Students (Priority will be given to CUHK students at the Faculty of Arts)
Fee: Free (lunch will be provided)
Participants must attend the whole-day activities.

During World War II, thousands of Chinese soldiers were sent to India for training, but many of them ended up deserting from the army and starting new lives in India. Chen Ching Lin was one of these deserters, and this talk aims to trace his journey in India from 1943 to 1946. In addition to shedding light on the little-known story of the Chinese deserters in India, this talk also delves into how the Chinese Nationalist government’s efforts to discipline the Chinatowns in India conflicted with the British Raj’s colonial anxieties. Furthermore, it argues that a subaltern perspective can integrate the modern histories of China and India into a single narrative framework.

 

Speaker 
Prof. CAO Yin, Department of History, Tsinghua University
曹寅教授 | 清華大學歷史系
Cao Yin is Associate Professor and Cyrus Tang Scholar in the Department of History, Tsinghua University. He teaches global history, Indian history, and colonialism at Tsinghua. He is the author of Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) and From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885-1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2017). He has also published articles in journals such as Journal of World History, Modern Asian Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Indian Historical Review. He is now undertaking a research project that focuses on exploring the Malacca dilemma faced by British India during the late nineteenth century. The project aims to investigate how Yunannese Muslims and their mules in Upper Burma played a crucial role in assisting the Government of India to resolve this dilemma.

There are lessons for us to learn about how to write new histories in the present by taking a careful look at how, in the past, new histories were composed from new chronologies. In the cultures around Europe and the Mediterranean Sea in the ancient and medieval periods, scholars seem to have understood quite clearly that any new story about mankind required a new historical time, a new chronology. Writing a new time was thus an essential characteristic of a meaningfully distinct political community, and as a result was accorded great authority. This talk will present a few thought-provoking examples from works composed in Greek and Latin in order to illustrate these points, and to open up comparisons with other historical cultures and with modern historiographies.

Speaker 
Prof. Jesse TORGERSON
College of Letters, Wesleyan University

ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

Still today, blessings and addresses delivered by the pope on special occasions each year are directed urbi et orbi - "to the city and the world". This tradition dates back to the Middle Ages, when the popes played on the resemblance between the Latin words for city (urbs) and world (orbs) to stress their position as both the rulers of the city of Rome itself, and also the head of an institution, the Church of Rome, that claimed to hold primacy over the whole (Christian) world. Medieval popes based in Rome could claim to speak urbi et orbi in large part because the city was the "it" destination city of the European Middle Ages, the place visited by more foreigners than anywhere else by far, for reasons ranging from tourism (including religious tourism/pilgrimage) to work and politics. The economy, institutions, and material contours of medieval Rome all evolved in response to the constant presence of huge numbers of outsiders and visitors; and Rome's split identity as a real city inhabited by local Romans on the one hand, and an almost mystical ideal shared and coveted by people living all over Europe and beyond on the other, created tensions and conflicts that made the urban landscape of medieval Rome a uniquely complicated place.

Speaker 
Prof. Hendrik DEY
Department of Art and Art History
Hunter College, The City University of New York

ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183