Speaker:
Jim Samson, Department of Music, CUHK
Adam Kielman, Department of Music, CUHK
Amanda Hsieh, Department of Music, CUHK
Frederick Lau, Department of Music, CUHK
Helan Yang Hon Lun, Department of Music, HKBU
Wai Ling Cheong, Department of Music CUHK
Tel: 3943-4446
Email: jeff@cuhk.edu.hk
“A Life in Six chapters” is Louisa Wei’s latest documentary, devoted to the writer Xiao Jun. It can be seen as part of a series of works beginning with “Storm under the Sun” on the Hu Feng Affair, and including documentaries on Wang Shiwei, the cultural critic who became one of the first intellectuals to be purged by Mao in the Yan’an period, and the writer Xiao Hong, who after a six-year common-law marriage to Xiao Jun, eloped to Hong Kong, where she died a tragically early death.
Xiao Jun was an eternal maverick, who never became a formal member of the CCP, despite working for many years in its cultural orbit as a writer and journalist. Louisa Wei’s film brings him back to life using extensive autobiographical audio recordings he made in the early 1980s, as well as a series of exceptional interviews with his family members, friends, colleagues and other witnesses of the times. The great events experienced by Xiao’s generation feature prominently in the film: the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the death of Lu Xun in 1936, the idealistic promises of the CCP base in Yan’an, so often betrayed in reality, Mao’s proclamation of the PRC in 1949, the purges of intellectuals in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution, marked by red guard violence and suicides of prominent writers like Lao She. All are depicted in vivid colors through the testimony of witnesses like Lu Xun’s son Zhou Haiying or Jia Zhifang, a victim of the Anti-Hu Feng purge.
As the ideals of a generation were shattered time and again by party politics and violent struggle, Xiao Jun remained an eternal optimist, unwilling to dwell on past wrongs or tragic episodes, like the loss of his daughter in the Cultural Revolution. The film effectively uses archival images and carefully selected music from each era to situate Xiao’s story against the great tapestry of history. This moving film will be of great interest to audiences concerned with China’s modern history, as well as the complex negotiations between intellectuals and politics.
Speaker: S. Louisa Wei (Director of A Life In Six Chapters, Associate Professor, School of Creative Media, City U)
Discussant: Wong Nim Yan (Associate Professor, Dept of Chinese Language and Literature, CUHK)
Moderator: Li Tiecheng (Lecturer, Dept of Cultural and Religious studies, CUHK)
Language of the Documentary: English with Chinese Subtitles｜
Post screening talk will be conducted in Mandarin・Complemented with Cantonese and English｜
Free Admission｜Limited seats｜First Come First Served
Co-organized by Master of Arts programme in Intercultural Studies (MAICS) and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Religious Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13641960
Facebook Event Page: https://fb.me/e/2NUDNGAE9
Website: www.cuhk.edu.hk/crs/ccs
Enquiry: cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk
Professor Padovani will use the case of Tianzifang (田子坊) in Shanghai to discuss Shanghai government’s strategies in dealing with heritage, difficulties they encounter when accommodating different stakeholders involved, and controversies in defining heritage.
Speaker: Professor Florence Padovani
Researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC), Hong Kong
Director of Sino-French Centre (CFC), Tsinghua University, Beijing
Associate Professor at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, hundreds of contemporary art projects and festivals have emerged in Japan. Many of these art events are funded by local governments in the hope of revitalizing respective regions amidst the depopulation crisis. The Setouchi Triennale, which takes place once in every three years since 2010 across a dozen of island communities in the Seto Inland Sea, is one of the renowned examples. Besides quantitative results such as visitor numbers or economic effects, how should we understand the changes the Triennale brought to local communities? How have the communities been revitalized? In this talk, I shift the focus and introduce my ethnographic observation from traditional local events in the region, and demonstrate how these events are indicative of the social consequences of major revitalization measures exemplified by the Setouchi Triennale.
Speaker: Dr. TU Shiu Hong, Simon
(Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Japanese Studies)
Dr. Simon Tu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Japanese Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained in anthropology, his research covers urban and rural revitalization in Japan, Japanese visual cultures, socially-engaged art, as well as artist space in Hong Kong.
Professor WONG Wai-yin Christina, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies and at the Divinity School of Chung Chi College of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has been awarded the 2021 Early Career Award from the Research Grants Council (RGC) in recognition of her excellent achievement in the research area of transnational history of Christianity.
Professor Wong’s award-winning project entitled “Radical Social Movements and Networked Ecumenism: An Analysis of Three Christian NGOs in Colonial Hong Kong, 1960s–1990s” delves into how transnational ecumenical networks established and supported social movements in colonial Hong Kong. The project examined the Tsuen Wan Ecumenical Social Service Centre, the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, and the Society for Community Organisation and their role in social movements throughout the city’s late 20th century colonial history. These organisations worked with the poor to addressing socio-economic issues like housing and labour concerns. Professor Wong adopted a multidisciplinary approach combining political studies, sociology, human geography, social work and theology.
As a graduate at CUHK, Professor Wong majored in theology receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1999 before completing a Masters of Philosophy degree in 2001 specialising in religious and gender studies. She then completed her doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, with the aim of strengthening her research in gender studies and theological education. She returned to CUHK as a faculty member in 2015, and has taught topics widely about feminist theology, body theologies, women and world missions, and gender in ministry. The transnational history of Christianity in South China, including Guangzhou and Hong Kong, is her major research focus which she hopes will transform local communities and churches. Professor Wong completed a research project focused on rediscovering the history of transnational cooperation between western women missionaries and Chinese women in Guangzhou, which was funded by the Direct Grant for Research by the Faculty of Arts, CUHK in 2016–2017.
Professor Wong said, “I am very honoured to receive the Early Career Award. As a scholar of mission studies of world Christianity and a practitioner of the ecumenical movement, I hope my research can help foster our analysis on transnational ecumenical networks and their impact on social movements in colonial Hong Kong, and contribute to historical research on Christianity in Hong Kong.”
About the RGC Early Career Scheme
The RGC Early Career Scheme aims to nurture junior academics and encourage them to continue their excellent work in the years ahead.
With the Faculty of Arts of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as one of its sponsors, the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation (HKPFF) will launch Season 2 of Break Out: IPNHK Reading & Dialogue Series in November 2021.
The first event of the series, featuring Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral and Yao Feng, her Chinese translator and a poet himself, will take place on 20 November 2021 at 8:00pm via Ifeng, Facebook and YouTube.
Curated by Professor Max Xiaobing Tang of the Faculty of Arts, the second season of Break Out will present contemporary poets from Portugal, Greece, Russia, the US and Mainland China along with their translators. Two of the seven sessions will pay tribute to important poets of the past. To further enrich online participants’ appreciation of poetry and art, each session will be accompanied by a dance film, a musical performance, or a presentation of visual arts.
The Break Out series is a virtual extension of International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (IPNHK), a biennial programme organised by the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation until 2019. IPNHK, founded by Chinese poet Bei Dao in 2009 when he was a distinguished professor in the Faculty of Arts, is one of the most influential international poetry festivals in Asia. The Faculty of Arts has long been a sponsor of IPNHK and its programming.
Developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Break Out brings world-renowned poets and their Chinese (or, in some cases, English) translators together. Poets and translators read poetry in different languages and discuss topics of common interest to them. Livestreamed in seven sessions from May to August in 2021, the first season of Break Out featured 12 international poets, drawing over 3.3 million viewers in the process.
“We will introduce some new elements and format in the new season,” said Professor Tang. “Our goal is to make the online poetry events a rich and multi-faceted experience for our audiences, taking the platform, which emerged from the pandemic, beyond the pandemic. We wish to make poems and voices from all over the world part of our inner life.”
The second season of Break Out will run from November until February 2022.
The Research Programme for Lingnan Culture of the Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK and the Centre for Chinese Music Studies, Department of Music, CUHK jointly present the Music of Lingnan Culture: Naamyam and Cantonese. All are welcome. Details are as follows:
3943 7393 / ics-lingnan@cuhk.edu.hk
Seven percent of children are affected by developmental language disorder (DLD), a condition that causes unexplained difficulties in learning one’s native (and subsequent) language(s). Our current understanding regarding the linguistic and cognitive profiles of DLD in Chinese is limited. This not only is incommensurate with the large number of Chinese-speaking children affected by DLD, but also impedes the formulation of mechanistic explanations of DLD. In this talk, I will present an ongoing systematic review of the literature on the manifestations of DLD in Chinese. The searches resulted in 50 articles published between 1997 and 2021 in Chinese and English journals. I will summarize the main findings of this body of literature and discuss future directions for this line of inquiry.
Speaker: Professor Li SHENG (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Li Sheng is Professor and a faculty member of the Speech Therapy Unit at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Prior to joining PolyU, she held faculty positions at the University of Texas Austin and the University of Delaware from 2007 to 2021. She conducts basic, translational, and clinical practice research with the goals of advancing understanding of the mechanisms of language development and improving the quality of life of individuals who have language disorders. She studies how learner-internal factors, such as learning capacity and executive functions, environmental factors, such as the quantity and quality of language input, and linguistic factors, such as properties of the to-be-learned languages jointly shape learning outcomes.
A recent case involved a cyber-criminal operating in Germany, fluently speaking German however with a fairly strong foreign accent. The investigators were interested to know, where the person came from, his age, how long he had been in Germany and in which area he had learnt his German. Can this be done? In this talk I will show, how phonetic/linguistic analysis can provide useful information and where the expert reaches his/her limits.
Forensic phonetics is not only an unusual field within the area of forensics and criminology, it also involves a variety of fairly different disciplines like linguistics, acoustics, physics and medicine. Good perceptual and technical skills are required and certain cases may require an expert who shows patience and perseverance. In this talk I will first provide a brief history and will discuss the different methods that were developed over the years. Next, an overview is given of the different services that phoneticians can provide. With real case examples I will show which speaker features may be speaker specific and demonstrate the way from a criminal recording to a forensic report.
Speaker: Dr. Gea de JONG-LENDLE (The Philipps University of Marburg)
Dr. Gea de Jong-Lendle has undertaken forensic investigations since 1994, for both prosecution and defense. In the U.S.A. she assisted in the analysis of airplane recordings derived from a blackbox and was involved in a project on the acoustic classification of gunshot signatures. During her time in the UK, she provided forensic voice analysis services for a number of UK institutes/forces like the Forensic Science Service, Metropolitan Police, Liverpool Police and assisted police forces in the Netherlands and Turkey. Since 2016, she is leading a forensic phonetics team in Marburg conducting forensic analyses in Germany for the German Police, defense lawyers, firms or private clients. Other academic posts include Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and Lecturer at City University in London. She holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Florida and an M.Phil. in Computer Speech and Language Processing from the University of Cambridge.
Dr. Gea de Jong-Lendle’s main research interests focus on the area of acoustic-, perceptive- and forensic phonetics. As a member of the Dyvis research team in Cambridge, she has contributed to the creation of a large forensic database (100 male speakers of the Standard Southern British Dialect) and to a variety of smaller research projects and presentations on e.g. speaker variability, F0 characteristics, language change and formant behaviour. In a former research project she was involved in the creation of a database and research papers on speech produced under the influence of alcohol. Current interests include voicelineups, articulation & dysfluency and motor recognition.
