Notes of a former native speaker

CFP: Academic Writing Theory and Practice in an International Context

2012-01-22T21:28:00.003-05:00

In the autumn of 2012, The Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University will launch the first taught postgraduate programme in Academic Writing in the UK and Europe: The MA/PG Diploma in Academic Writing Theory and Practice/The PG Certificate in Academic Writing Development. To mark the launch of this programme, we are organising a one-day conference, with the theme, ‘Academic Writing Theory and Practice in an International Context’.

We invite 20-minute presentations (followed by 10 minutes of discussion) on research into academic writing as text, process and practice, within national and/or international contexts. The sub-themes of the conference are:
Forms and practices of disciplinary and interdisciplinary writing
Teaching and developing student and professional academic writing
Rhetoric and academic writing
Writing/publishing in English as an academic lingua franca and the trans-nationalisation of knowledge
Writing programme development and management
The keynote speaker of the conference is Dr. Theresa Lillis from the Centre for Language and Communication at the Open University, UK. Dr. Lillis has published research on student and professional academic literacies and is the author of Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire (Routledge, 2001) and, with Mary Jane Curry, Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English (Routledge, 2010).

The conference panels as communities of knowledge and practice!
We would very much like the panels of the conference to become small interpretive communities through the dialogues between panellists and their audience. We encourage participants, whether presenters or non-presenters, to remain in the panels they choose to attend and engage with the topics and ideas of the respective panel.

Non-presenters who would like to share in the conference discussions are also invited to attend.

Proposals and Registration
To submit a proposal, please email a 250-word abstract to writing.caw@coventry.ac.uk by 31 January 2012. We will send you a response by 5 March 2012.

Registration for the conference will be open between 5 March and 10 April 2012. The registration fee is £45 (British Pounds Sterling). Payment and booking details will follow at a later date.

東北大學的多語言環境

2012-01-20T13:49:00.002-05:00

我剛跟一個韓國學生聊天了(聊了天？)。她說她會講四種語言，以前覺得還不錯，可是來到東北大學以後認識了一些會講七種語言的同學!我覺得自己很糟糕，連一種外語也沒有學好......

快要開學了

2012-01-03T15:16:00.002-05:00

我最近在想，用第二個語言(或者第三,四,五個語言)寫作要經過多少翻譯呢？像我，為了寫我剛剛寫的句子，必須先用英文想，想到了以後開始慢慢地翻，結果我寫到的中文句子跟我原來用英文想的句子不太一樣。這可能是因為我寫的時候，忘記我本來在想甚麼。

我們快要開學了。

CFP: Asian Culture(s) and Globalization

2011-12-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

(via)

Papers are invited for publication in a special issue entitled "Asian Culture(s) and Globalization" -- edited by I-Chun Wang (National Sun Yat-sen U) -- of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb (ISSN 1481-4374). A humanities and social sciences quarterly published since 1999 by Purdue University Press, the journal is peer-reviewed, in full-text, in open-access, and ISI-AHCI, MLA, Scopus, etc., indexed.

"Asian Culture(s) and Globalization" is not concerned with East meeting West; rather, it pays attention to aspects of Asian culture(s) in transformation owing to the impact of globalization. During the past thirty years, scholars and critics have noticed the transformation of Asian culture(s), its resistant voices, and the redefinition of local cultures. As the largest and most populous continent, Asia is home to a large number of languages and cultures: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Pacific Islanders, etc., contributions of cultural products and thought represent a significant part of today's global culture. Authors of the issue discuss redefined regional cultures in the context of globalization in the fields of literature, education, music, urban studies, cinema, gender studies, sociology, history, and related fields in the context of comparative cultural studies.

Papers are 6000-7000 words in length and in the MLA parenthetical sources and works cited format (but no footnotes or end notes): for the style guide of the journal consult .

Deadline of submissions is 31 May 2012 to I-Chun Wang at
icwang@faculty.nsysu.edu.tw

Professor I-Chun Wang
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
Director / Center for the Humanities
National Sun Yat-sen U, Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan

看房子

2011-11-20T16:08:00.000-05:00

我們今天去看了兩間公寓.兩間都不錯,而且週邊生活機能完善.可是我覺得買房子是個很大的決定...

累壞了...

2011-11-17T15:07:00.000-05:00

最近一直熬夜改學生的作文.("Portfolio"中文怎麼說?)還好明天不用上課,下禮拜因為感恩節只要上一天的課.

下雪了

2011-10-27T21:41:00.003-04:00

萬聖節還沒到，怎麼會下雪？

好多作文...

2011-10-11T08:45:00.000-04:00

非常抱歉，最近因為要批改很多作文，所以我沒時間寫部落格。

我們的箱子來了

2011-09-19T20:40:00.003-04:00

我們七月中從台灣運過來的三十個箱子終於到了，可是一當我看到其中兩個箱子被撕破了兩大片，心裡就很緊張。一個箱子裝著電腦和銀幕，另外一個裝著廚房用品。電腦中央處理機的外殼現在有一點凹進去的樣子，銀幕後面被刮了一大痕，可是電腦好像還可以用。我還不敢看第二個箱子，因為裡面好像有東海英語中心同事朋友們送我們的咖啡杯......

試用中文寫部落格

2011-09-18T16:47:00.000-04:00

如果你/妳受不了看下面的菜中文，不要怪我，都是因為Paul Matsuda前天在他的演講中叫我們用第二語言試寫一篇有關我們學生的文章。他大概要我們了解留學生每次用英文寫報告要面臨的挑戰。我寫了三句非常簡單的句子就放棄了。因為Paul這樣的提醒，我就決定用中文寫部落格。

A visit to Tunghai from former Shansi rep Tom Gold

2011-06-28T06:26:00.002-04:00

I finally got to meet another of my dissertation interviewees in person last Thursday (6/23). Dr. Thomas B. Gold, who was an Oberlin rep to Tunghai in the early 1970s, came back to visit the campus before he participated in an international conference in Taipei. Tom was very helpful when I was working on my dissertation, providing me with lots of background and helping me with my analysis of the texts I was working with.

Linda and I had a nice time with him, walking around Tunghai's campus and chatting about what has changed and what hasn't since he taught here.

After a hearty lunch at a Hakka restaurant near Tunghai

Walking around Tunghai's campus

Looking for Tom's old room in the men's dorm

Found it!

The shower room had changed somewhat; most noticeably, a natural gas fueled water heater has replaced the one Tom remembered (for the old heater, he recalled, you literally had to gather sticks and light a fire to heat the water)*

Enjoying the view

Enjoying some Tunghai ice cream (I'm holding Linda's "Tunghai-sicle" as well as my own)

________________
*David Decker, who was acting chair of the Foreign Languages Department in 1980, told us about how he informed incoming teachers of the need to gather sticks to heat their water and (exaggerating a bit) that the Department would equip each teacher with a bow and arrow so that they could hunt for their food.

Who's a pig?

2011-06-27T13:03:00.000-04:00

This won't make any sense if you don't know that in Chinese, "pork" is called "pig meat" (豬肉)...

I won't mention where this happened (I don't want to go to jail), but for lunch today we went to a restaurant where one of us ordered a pork dish and the other ordered beef. When the clerk came over to our table with our food, she wasn't sure who had ordered what, so she asked (for some strange reason), "你們兩個,誰是豬?" (Basically, "Which one of you two is a pig?")

Well, I was chewing my cud when she asked, so obviously it wasn't me...

A Google translator-written drama

2011-03-06T06:43:00.003-05:00

Very touching...

DPP ad and the use(lessness?) of cultural memory

2010-11-14T03:26:00.002-05:00

I saw the following DPP political ad on Michael Turton's blog:

There are some interesting comments to his post about whether or not this ad will work. There are elections coming up at the end of the month here, and as usual, they're hard-fought. I've seen lots of ads talking about what this or that candidate is going to do for his or her constituency. Some people commenting on Turton's blog fault this ad for its focus on the past rather than on the future. The ad makes sort of a gesture toward the future at about 0:59 where it notes that politicians who have now run for president were "against presidential elections in the past," implying perhaps that President Ma (whose face is shown at this point, though he's not named) is not to be trusted. And perhaps there's a sense, for those who know the history, that a democratization so recently won is fragile and can be easily lost.

The question, though, is what kind of effects can be expected (and achievable) from a political ad that depends on fragments of cultural memory to motivate parents of twenty-somethings to gather up those fragments and pass them on to their children. The question implied by the blog comments might be best phrased as, quoting rhetorician Gerard Hauser, "whether the distance between the contracting relevance of the past and the fading horizon of the future precludes the possibility that we can still establish bonds of community"--and what kind of community we might establish. To be apathetic to the past portrayed in this ad is not even to disagree about the factuality of the events portrayed, but simply to refuse to identify with the kind of community the ad seems to be trying to create.

CFP DUO V conference Okinawa, JAPAN August 4-8, 2011

2010-10-09T04:39:00.000-04:00

The focus of Dialogue Under Occupation V is on ways of communicating in and about areas of the world confronting occupation. Engaging in 'dialogue' under occupation does not mean that the less powerful or powerless are accepting the occupation in any way, shape, or form, but that people are willing to confront their occupiers in an effort to be recognized as having equal human rights, including the ability to make autonomous decisions about how they should live and pursue their own definition of happiness. However, 'under occupation', these rights are undermined by the power differential between the occupier and the occupied.

As a result, if dialogue under occupation is to succeed in overturning injustice, circumstances must be created for the occupied to speak and act against occupation. It is within this space for action that we welcome presentations from activists, academics, and the general public for the forthcoming conference in Okinawa in August 2011.

Send submissions in English or Japanese to duo5@dialogueunderoccupation.org

For all proposals, send an abstract of 250-300 words and a separate cover sheet including your name and organizational affiliation by January 14, 2011

STRANDS

Please identify which of the following four strands best relates to your presentation.

Enactment: The domains wherein the politics and policies of occupation are enacted, realized through institutions attributed with and exercising power over other institutions and the public (e.g., governments, religious organizations, education departments and agencies).

Transaction: The domains wherein information about policies is reproduced, disseminated, endorsed, and/or challenged in an effort to inform (or misinform) the occupied and the occupiers (e.g., media sources, schools, churches).

Reaction: The domains wherein daily life under occupation occurs (e.g., the community, the workplace), loci where positioning of the "self" vs. the "other"--ingroup, outgroup, and/or intergroup status--transpires, and where historical narratives of occupation are revisited.

Resolution: The locus of peacemakers and peacekeepers, those who would peaceably resist occupation and find ways to resolve conflict, as well as those who advocate resignation, acceptance, and coexistence.

Website: http://dialogueunderoccupation.org

CFP: LAST CALL De-Centering Cold War History: Street Level Experiences & Global Change, Tucson Arizona, Nov. 4-7, 2010

2010-08-19T15:18:00.000-04:00

Cold War histories are often told as stories of national leaders, state policies and the global confrontation that pitted a Communist Eastern Block against a Capitalist West. We acknowledge the important consequences of this global competition, of the arms race, and of international diplomacy and detente, but we seek to bring together scholars who contribute new analytical approaches to reveal the complexities in the historical trajectory of the Cold War. To this end, we plan to engage in a collaborative effort to present and publish a street-level history of the global Cold War era. As three collaborators from different fields, we issue this CFP first for a Conference Presentation at the University of Arizona (November 4-November 7, 2010). Second, we will publish selected conference presentations in a Special Edition Journal. We invite contributions that challenge Cold War master narratives with a focus on super-power politics and de-center a historical narrative that situates the Soviet Union and the United States at the core and the rest of the world in the periphery. Your analytical approach should consider local-level experiences and regional initiatives that contributed to the making of a Cold War world; all geographical regions are welcome and cross-disciplinary approaches are encouraged. Our primary goal is to inspire a fruitful dialogue and new forms of collaboration among interdisciplinary scholarly approaches and to forge new research directions in the study of the Cold War.

At the Conference, we envision a combination of intensive workshops among participants, as well as panels and presentation open to the public. We ask Conference participants to arrive by Thursday. Friday and Saturday will be structured around presentations for the public in the mornings (Friday and Saturday, 9:00 10:45 AM and 11:15 to 1:00 PM), and workshops with participants in the afternoons (Friday and Saturday, 3:00 to 6:00 PM). Conference participants (and journal contributors) will receive reimbursement for travel to Tucson, Arizona, to attend the Conference; this invitation will include food and accommodation (three nights) on location.

Please send your 500-word proposal for an individual presentation and a short curriculum vitae (latest by August 25, 2010) to:

Project Director:
Jadwiga Pieper Mooney (Department of History, University of Arizona)
jadwiga@email.arizona.edu

Collaborators:
Fabio Lanza (Departments of History and East Asian Studies, University of Arizona)
flanza@email.arizona.edu

Elizabeth Oglesby
(Departments of Geography and Latin American Studies, University of Arizona)
eoglesby@email.arizona.edu

In your proposal, please indicate your name, institutional affiliation, address, e-mail address and what kind of audiovisual equipment you will need, if any.

Selected participants will be informed by September 15, 2010.

Project Director:
Jadwiga Pieper Mooney (Department of History, University of Arizona)
jadwiga@email.arizona.edu

Collaborators:
Fabio Lanza (Departments of History and East Asian Studies, University of Arizona)
flanza@email.arizona.edu

Elizabeth Oglesby
(Departments of Geography and Latin American Studies, University of Arizona)
eoglesby@email.arizona.edu

The Amazon Meme

2010-05-26T12:55:00.001-04:00

A couple of blogs I read have had posts up about their writers' first Amazon purchases, so I thought I'd check out my own for a minute. Actually it took more than a minute, and in the process I found out that somehow I've got two Amazon accounts. Anyway, I tracked down my first purchase. It's a bit weird:

My first purchase, which was shipped on August 19, 1996, was Wade Davis's Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie I think I'd just seen Wes Craven's awful movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow, on cable. The book is pretty interesting, though!

My second purchase, shipped August 17, 1996 (probably the same purchase) was Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Together with the Davis book, that's a weird combination. I vaguely remember reading that book. Anyone still read it?

The summer of 1996 was the first time I stayed in Taiwan for the whole summer. That summer, I studied Chinese at the Chinese Language Center at Feng Chia U. I also bought a car, a 1990 Ford Laser--it only cost NT$70,000. I guess I needed some reading materials for all the time I ended up spending at the auto mechanic.

It looks like I haven't bought anything for myself from Amazon in years. Their shipping to Taiwan is too expensive, for one thing. I prefer BetterWorldBooks now... (little plug--if you're interested in those 2 books, check out BWB first.)

CFP: Travelling Languages

2010-05-06T10:42:00.000-04:00

Travelling Languages:
Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World

10th Annual Conference of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication

In association with the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University

03-05 December 2010, Leeds, United Kingdom

The world is ever 'on the move'. The opportunities and challenges of both real and virtual travel are very much at the heart of the emergent interdisciplinary field of 'mobilities', which deals with the movement of peoples, objects, capital, information and cultures across an increasingly globalised and apparently borderless world. In the practices, processes and performances of moving – whether for voluntary leisure, forced migration or economic pragmatism – we are faced with the negotiation and re-negotiation of identities and meaning relating to places and pasts.

Within the increasing complexities of global flows and encounters, intercultural skills and competencies are being challenged and re-imagined. The vital role of languages and the intricacies of intercultural dialogue have largely remained implicit in the discourses surrounding mobilities. This Conference seeks to interrogate the role of intercultural communication and of languages in the inevitable moments of encounter which arise from all forms of 'motion'.

This international and interdisciplinary event is the 10th anniversary conference of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) and is being organised in association with the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change. Through this event we aim to bring together many of the sub-themes of previous IALIC conferences and focus upon the issues of culture, communication and translation in a mobile world, including: languages and intercultural communication in local and global education, tourism, hospitality, migration, translation, real and virtual border-crossings.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are pleased to receive 20–minute research papers or descriptions of pedagogical practice which address or go beyond the following themes:

• Moving languages - continuities and change;

• Real and virtual border crossings;

• Tourist encounters and communicating with the 'other';

• Tourism's role in inter-cultural dialogue;

• The languages of diasporas and diasporic languages;

• Dealing with dialects and the evolution/dissolution of communities;

• Hospitality and languages of welcome;

• Learning the languages of migration;

• Linguistic boundaries and socio-cultural inclusions and exclusions;

• 'Located' and 'dislocated' languages and identities;

• Practices and performances of translation.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words including title and full contact details as an electronic file to Jane Wilkinson at IALIC2010[at]leeds.ac.uk. You may submit your abstract as soon as possible but no later than 1st June 2010.

Please send any queries to us at IALIC2010[at]leeds.ac.uk

CFP: The 4th Conference on College English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

2010-05-04T10:40:00.000-04:00

Call for Abstracts
The 4th Conference on College English
College English Programs: Design and implementation
National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

The 4th Conference on College English will be held by the Foreign Language Center of National Chengchi University (NCCU) on Saturday 16th October 2010. Teachers and researchers in ELT/TESOL are invited to offer scholarly papers on teaching and learning English at college or university level. The theme for this year’s conference is College English Programs: Design and implementation.

Undergraduate English programs are an important part of General Education, with an additional mission of cultivating abilities necessary for students’ future academic and career development. Freed from restrictions of college entrance examinations, educators have considerable choice and autonomy. Universities, with their various objectives and student populations, have different needs, in terms of materials and methods, curriculum guidelines, instructor deployment, number of credit hours, ability grouping, course content, and exit benchmarks. Therefore, English education policies at the university level vary from institution to institution. These valuable experiences could profitably be shared and discussed in a forum among scholars from different university contexts. The 4th Conference on College English will provide a forum for all those involved with College English/Freshman English program design and implementation, whether policy makers, course planners, research personnel or teachers at the chalkface, to present their work.

We welcome individual paper presentation and panel discussion proposals which are related to the above issues, as well as papers on any other aspect of English taught as a foreign language at tertiary institutions. Please send your 250-500 word abstract, as an email attachment (Word or PDF document), to flcenter [at] nccu.edu.tw. Also please download and complete this biodata form, and attach it to the email.

Important dates:

Abstract submission deadline: 11th July 2010

Abstract acceptance notification: 11th August 2010

The 4th College English Conference: 16th October 2010

Full paper submission deadline (for post-conference Proceedings): 16th December 2010

Enquiries: Ms Derya Liu, (02) 2939-3091 ext. 62396 deryaliu@nccu.edu.tw

CFP: Research on Research

2010-04-28T03:54:00.000-04:00

(source)

An ESL/EFL perspective on this would be interesting, I think.

3.6 zettabytes. 34 gigabytes. 100,500 words a day. 11.8 hours a day. 350% increase over three decades.

As these numbers from a recent study suggest, students' research processes and information literacy skills are being challenged by the nature and volume of information in the digital age. In the 2008 report published by University College London, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, several common computer uses and information behaviors of young people are identified, behaviors the researchers find quite concerning: lack of understanding of their information needs; preference for basic search engines like Google rather than article databases; use of natural language terms instead of subject terms or keywords; quick scanning and skimming of information sites; little or no evaluation of the quality of the information used; and cutting and pasting information into papers without providing the correct citations.

Head and Eisenberg (2009) report from their discussions with groups of college students from six different US campuses that students believe the challenges of conducting research for both school assignments and personal uses are exacerbated by digital information. Head and Eisenberg note that students “reported having particular difficulty traversing a vast and ever-changing information landscape.” Bauerlein (2008) takes this idea a step further, as he believes students’ frustration has caused them disconnect from their education. Of this, Bauerlein writes, “With so much intellectual matter circulating in the media and on the Internet, teachers, writers, journalists and other ‘knowledge workers’ don’t realize how thoroughly young adults and teens tune it out.”

Despite the amount of discussions and research occurring outside of composition studies, conversations in the field on students as digital researchers remain limited, with most attention still being paid to the product of students' research--the research paper--and specifically to the popular topic of plagiarism and how students’ research skills and research writing skills are inadequate. Compositionists have long considered and studied in depth the impact of computer use, multimedia, and the Web on students as writers, yet little work has been published on students as researchers in the digital age.

Therefore, we are seeking essays to complete an edited collection on research in the digital age that provide answers to the following questions:

• What strategies are students using to conduct research in the digital information age? In what ways can composition teachers help students build on, adapt, and revise these strategies in productive ways?
• What methodologies are available to composition teacher-scholars to better understand students’ research-based writing in the digital information age?
• How might composition teachers help students apply their non-academic research strategies to academic work?
• In what ways might composition teacher-scholars frame discussion of digital research to move beyond anxiety, fear, and blame? That is, how can we help students and teachers most effectively navigate digital research-writing spaces rather than just avoid them?

We seek essays addressing these and other questions, including projects that may take advantage of digital affordances (audio, video, etc.). We encourage potential contributors to consider both the process and product of student research writing in the digital age.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, please send a 500 word abstract of your proposed essay to Dr. Randall McClure at randallmcclure [at] georgiasouthern.edu by July 1, 2010. Queries are welcome.

CFP: Rhetoric and Writing across Language Boundaries

2010-04-25T12:08:00.000-04:00

(source)

Call for Proposals — Due February 15, 2011

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have increasingly recognized that communication today involves an engagement with multiple languages and literacies. This realization has been motivated by developments in globalization, new media technology, and postcolonial perspectives, all trends in the field that have called attention to the transnational flow of people and texts and to the hybridity of language itself. Practitioners now acknowledge that developing proficiency solely in Standardized Written English is inadequate for contemporary communicative needs. Further, practitioners also realize that judging the competencies of second language writers and rhetors according to native English speaker norms fails to do justice to the rich resources multilinguals bring to communication.

The ability to address these emergent needs is hampered by the monolingual assumptions informing our disciplinary discourses and pedagogical practices. Such assumptions have included the following: that writers acquire rhetorical competence one language at a time; that rhetorical proficiency is made up of separate competencies for separate languages; that texts are informed by rhetorical values unique to the different languages in which they are constructed; and that only one rhetorical tradition provides coherence for a text at a given time. In light of such trends, scholars in rhetoric and composition now call for the study of the cross-language relations of writers and writing in order to reconfigure the discourses and practices of our discipline.

To pursue this mission, conference participants are invited to address the following questions:

What are the unique strategies multilingual speakers bring to rhetoric and writing?

How can text be conceptualized differently in order to accommodate hybrid codes and conventions?

How do we conceive of rhetorical and written competence if contact between languages is the norm in today’s society?

What rhetorical resources help one communicate across language boundaries?

What are the new genres evolving in the linguistic contact zones?

What pedagogical strategies facilitate productive engagement with multilingual texts?

How should our assessment rubrics, rhetorical norms, and writing standards be revised to accommodate language diversity?

What curriculum and policy changes may help schools and universities make spaces for the rhetorical resources multilingual students bring to classrooms?

The program committee invites proposals for papers focusing on the questions above and on any subject that provides fresh perspectives on multilingualism in rhetoric and composition. As was the case in previous conferences, the papers presented in the conference will be considered for inclusion in a book to be published on this subject.

Submit carefully written abstracts (250 words) that include your name, paper title, professional affiliation, institution name, mailing address, phone number, and e-mail address via e-mail attachment to rhetoric2011@outreach.psu.edu.

Call for proposals are due February 15, 2011.

During April 2011 you will receive e-mail notification regarding abstract acceptance.

Important note: Persons whose abstracts are accepted should register for the conference by June 1, 2011.

Questions regarding proposals should be sent to:
Suresh Canagarajah
Kirby Professor in English and Applied Linguistics
303 Sparks Building
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park PA 16802
E-mail: asc16@psu.edu

CFP: Globalization in Asia

2010-03-08T13:02:00.001-05:00

GLOBALIZATION IN ASIA: Perspectives and Prospects for the Second Decade of 21st Century

International Conference
Graduate Institute of Asian Studies, Tamkang University
Taipei, TAIWAN
October 29-30, 2010

Going through the tumultuous last few years of the 20th century, followed by ups and downs of the first decade of the 21st century, Asian countries are now entering the second decade of the new millennium. The end of globalization haunted people in the last century is not visible or possible right now or in the foreseeable future. In an era of globalization, many important contemporary issues cannot adequately be addressed by recourse to economic, political, or sociological analysis alone. To explore or understand such crucial regions as Asia, it is also not enough to analyze actors and actions that take place on a particular level of analysis—individual, state, or international system. This conference is focusing on interdependence among states, peoples, and societies in the forthcoming decade in Asia, especially East Asia, a region filled with differing and sometimes conflicting interests, points of view, or value systems. With increasing interactions of peoples, goods, and knowledge within and outside the region, aspects on human rights, constitutional reforms, international politics, and international socio-economic as well as cultural environments must also be considered. Therefore, we plan to invite scholar of interest and specializations in Asia to raise proposals for sessions, panel discussions and individual papers at a conference on the Asian region.

We welcome proposals from various disciplines. We are especially interested in topics such as (but not limited to) the following:

* International human rights
* International politics
* East-West comparisons in constitutional reforms
* Cultural diversity and political development
* Economic and technical cooperation
* Development of civilization and multicultural media and arts
* Cultural identity of ethnics and societies
* International migration

Proposals (of no more than 200 words) are due by *April 10, 2010* and should be submitted electronically (along with address, phone number and e-mail) to: Graduate Institute of Asian Studies, Tamkang University, 151 Yingchuan Rd., Tamsui, Taipei 251, TAIWAN. Tel: 886-2-2621-5656 ext. 2709, e-mail: tijx@oa.tku.edu.tw.

Short note on Formosa Betrayed's post-publication fate

2010-02-28T10:30:00.004-05:00

One story that is circulated about Formosa Betrayed is that the KMT (or Chiang Kai-shek himself) bought the copyright to the book and suppressed it (here for Chinese Wikipedia link). My problems with that story are (1) I've never seen anyone cite actual published evidence for it (although I realize I shouldn't expect that such an act would be widely publicized), and (2) it doesn't account for the fact that Da Capo Press published a reprint edition of Formosa Betrayed in 1976. On top of that, in a biographical article on Kerr published in The Ryukyuanist (pdf) in 2001, A. P. Jenkins wrote that Kerr himself at least partly blamed John King Fairbank for the Da Capo Press edition that was too expensive for most people to buy.

Kerr jokes with Linda Glick of Houghton Mifflin in late 1965, responding to word that the publication of the book would have to be delayed until early 1966:

I note the publication delay with regret, but by now rather never expect to see it published! Soon enough the KMT Chinese will be buying up the whole edition, as they did the Macmillan Co's China Lobby book some years ago! Put a big one and make them pay!

Despite that joke, an undated cover sheet for the folder containing some of Kerr's correspondence with Houghton Mifflin includes Kerr's comments that he strongly believed Fairbank was involved in the company's decision to sell the copyright to Da Capo. He writes, "I have no documentary proof that Fairbank had a hand in the HMCO decision, but friends close to the Boston-Harvard connection tend to agree with this interpretation. Hence I withdrew FORMOSA BETRAYED fro[m] HMCO and recovered the copyright."

I did find one letter to Kerr from March 1970 that asked about Kerr's opinion regarding a rumor that the copyright to Formosa Betrayed had been bought by "Madwoman Chiang" (in the letter-writer's words), but I couldn't find Kerr's response to this letter. (Because of Japanese copyright law, some of the Kerr collection at the archives, including quite a bit of correspondence, is closed to researchers until fifty years after Kerr's death. Guess I'd better keep taking my vitamins...) But judging from Kerr's comments on the cover sheet (quoted above) and from his comments in a draft of a 1987(?) letter to Seng-bi Shaw (which Jenkins cites), Kerr was convinced that Fairbank had a hand in HM's deal with Da Capo Press because the pro-PRC Fairbank, according to Kerr, wanted Americans to view Taiwan as "merely another province of China, though by chance surrounded by water."

[Update: Title changed--I forgot most people nowadays think "FB"="Facebook"...]

Some notes about publication history of George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed

2010-02-27T14:57:00.002-05:00

During winter vacation, we took a brief trip to Okinawa. The main purpose was to take a quick dip into the George H. Kerr collection at the Okinawa Prefectural Archives. For a while I've been wondering about the publication of Kerr's Formosa Betrayed--particularly any difficulties he might have had getting the book published--and the book's fate after publication by Houghton Mifflin in 1966. Since Kerr's book was highly critical of the KMT and its governing of Taiwan--and highly critical of how the US handled the issue of what to do with Taiwan after WWII--I suspected that he would have had difficulty getting it published at the least, and might have been branded a traitor, since criticism of Chiang Kai-shek by a public figure like Kerr was close to treason (against the US as well as the ROC) during the early years of the Cold War. (See Ross Y. Koen's The China Lobby in American Politics (NY: Octagon Books, 1974) for why this was so.)

So, armed with information on the Kerr collection that Dr. Jenkins, who catalogued the collection, helpfully provided me with, I went in search of some answers to my questions.

One question I had was about why Kerr didn't publish the book until 1965. According to an article on the website of the World United Formosans for Independence, Kerr and Edward Paine (who worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Taiwan) collaborated on a book in the late 1940s about what they had seen in Taiwan:

At the time Mr. Kerr had accepted an advance from a prominent American publishing house but later changed his mind and returned the advance. Supposedly, Mr. Kerr felt that he could do more for Taiwan by working with his high-ranking friends in the State Department rather than publishing the book which would embarrass the State Department. Mr. Paine consequently left angrily and went separate ways from Mr. Kerr.

In 1964 Mr. Kerr, reportedly, in his teaching capacity, was in need of publication and requested Mr. Paine's permission to use the materials he had assembled. Although it was no longer the most opportune time for the book, Mr. Paine gave his consent to Mr. Kerr. The book, Formosan [sic] Betrayed, was finally published in 1965.

A letter from Kerr to Linda Glick of Houghton Mifflin, dated 5 July 1965, might shed some more light on what was going on at that time, however. Kerr is responding in the letter to a suggestion by John King Fairbank that proofs of FB be sent to Washington for checking. In the letter, Kerr writes that

in 1947-48 I prepared an account of the Formosan affair for the Institute of Pacific Relations which Little, Brown & Co. were proposing to bring out. A prolonged silence followed which I was not able to penetrate until I discovered that the MS had been sent to the State Department and was there, of course, objected to, for I advocated intervention before Chiang K-S should move to Formosa and entrench himself. By 1950 it was too late; McCarthy was rising, and by the time I had retrieved my MS (not without difficulty) it was not possible to get a hearing.

If Kerr is referring here to the book that he and Paine worked on, then this letter gives a bit more context to the question of why it wasn't published soon after 2-28. It should also be noted that Kerr's anti-Chiang stance got him into trouble during the McCarthy era. He was investigated by the FBI while at Stanford and eventually lost his job there.

Kerr also discusses the issue of timing in his response to an author's questionnaire sent to him by Houghton Mifflin (undated, probably May 1965):

After watching events on post-war Formosa in 1945-1947 which culminated in the massacre of Formosan leaders seeking American help, and watching the loss of Formosan trust in American leadership after that affair, I began to prepare an account of what led to the 1947 crisis at Taipei. But 1950 was not the time to publish; the friends of Chiang Kai-shek were in full cry, the Mc Carthy Era was upon us. I put the MS away, working at it intermittantly [sic] and keeping notes through the early 1950's. In 1958 I brought it up to date, but it was still not the right time to try to place such a controversial subject before the public. I became involved in other projects, producing meanwhile a history of the Ryukyu Islands.

He goes on to write that in 1963, he began to receive "many requests for information concerning the postwar era--events in which I was directly involved. I was at last convinced that this painful and controversial subject should become a public record."

Another reason is also hinted at in the author's questionnaire response. Discussing possible promotional activities, he writes that he has reservations about going on TV and radio or giving lectures because "I find the Formosa Question difficult to handle. I am too emotionally involved, perhaps, to make a sufficiently objective presentation. I suppose if the book gets a fair reception I'll relax a bit about it, but the so highly organized pro-Nationalist propaganda net-work can bring terrible pressure to bear. At the moment I'm not sure I want to get involved on the air." It's possible that Kerr's emotional involvement also made it difficult to write about the events he experienced. In a review of the book, Douglas Mendel wrote that in 1963 Kerr had told him, "It is too painful to me to write up my old notes."

So, while 1965 might not have been the ideal time to publish Formosa Betrayed, it appears that there were several reasons for the delay.

More later on the post-publication fate of the book...

New book in the former native speaker's library

2010-02-26T04:23:00.001-05:00

Haven't posted about books in a while, but I came across the following book in Nobel Bookstore (諾貝爾) in Taichung. (The link below is not to Nobel, though, because I couldn't figure out how to find the book on their website.)

The book is entitled 梅心怡人權相關書信集2：跨國人權救援的開端1968-1974, and it consists of newspaper and magazine clippings and correspondence related to the activities of Lynn Miles, who has been active in Taiwan human rights work since the 1960s. The book, edited by 張炎憲 and 沈亮, has very clear scans of the clippings and correspondence, accompanied by Chinese translations. It also contains articles (in Chinese) on human rights history in Taiwan. It makes a good companion to A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through international Networks, 1960-1980, which Lynn Miles and Linda Gail Arrigo co-edited.

CFP: Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies

2010-02-21T20:03:00.002-05:00

(source)

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies
Vol. 37 | No. 1 | March 2011
Call for Papers
Deadline for Submissions: September 30, 2010

bios

"Bios," a Greek word meaning "life or way of living," has been used by theorists since the late 20th century to designate "life" within various "post-" conditions: e.g. the poststructuralist, postmodernist, post-human and post-traumatic. Michel Foucault defines "biopower" as "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations." Biopower then marks a drastic change in the means of control and governance. Rather than threatening individuals with punishment or death, biopower would manage entire society. Following but "reversing" Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that each individual could use "life" as a weapon with which to resist global capitalism. In another kind of dialogue with Foucault, Giorgio Agamben asserts that while our biological life is indeed entangled with our political life, in addition to the human state of "sovereignty" there is also the human state of "bare life."

Coming from a closely-related but slightly different angle, we also note that information technology has been increasingly pervading our life at every level, from the micro-biological-political to the macro-economic-political. Increasingly less face-to-face in our interpersonal communication and relationships, we now "live" in a world, a reality that is becoming ever more virtual and even disembodied. Mechanical gadgets such as iPods, iPhones, PDAs and cell phones have become extensions of our bodies/brains as rapid advances in biotechnology, biomedicine, bioengineering make the boundary between organism and "artificial life" ever more delicate. We now not only extend our bodies via cars and reassemble our bodies with transplanted organs: we also extend our minds/memories via electronic devices, and the technology for downloading/uploading between brain and computer is virtually on the horizon. Thus we may be becoming, or already be, "cyborgs" (Donna Haraway) or "posthuman" (N. Katherine Hayles).

How then are we now to rethink human life in terms of our increasingly intimate relations with machines, perhaps even our posthumanity? How are we to evaluate our "prosthetic life"? How are we now to define, interpret, understand concepts of law and polis (government, nation-state), state power, capitalism and globalizaton, in relation to human—and also earthly plant and animal—life (bios, ecos)? What new and unforeseen power struggles, perhaps even conflicts between human and non-human, life and death, might now be coming into play? In this era of the new bios, and new ecos, must we establish a new bio-(eco-)ethics, construct a new bio-(eco-)subjectivity?

We must ask once again, as philosophers asked thousands of years ago, "What makes us live?" "What ensures our existence?" "What is it that we call human life?" Can we look at (our own human) life anew and write about it afresh? How may the traditional literary genres, and specifically those concerned with life-writing, the writing of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, be changing in terms of their form and content and their media of expression? What is the significance of "life-writing" at this particular historical moment?

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies welcomes papers in the areas of literary, cultural and/or interdisciplinary studies on issues related to this special topic of "bios," and also welcomes papers on general topics.

Manuscript Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted in English. Please send the manuscript, a 300-word abstract, 5-6 keywords, and a vita as Word-attachments to concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw. The ideal length of the article should be within the range of 6,000-10,000 words. Alternatively, please mail us two hard copies and an IBM-compatible diskette copy. Concentric will acknowledge receipt of the submission but will not return it after review.
Manuscripts should be prepared according to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Except for footnotes in single space, manuscripts must be double-spaced, typeset in 12-point Times New Roman.
To facilitate the Journal’s anonymous refereeing process, there must be no indication of personal identity or institutional affiliation in the hard copy of the manuscript proper or the electronic file containing the manuscript proper. The name and institution of the author should appear only in the vita. The author may cite his/her previous works, but only in the third person.
The Journal will not consider for publication manuscripts being simultaneously submitted elsewhere.
If the paper has been published or submitted elsewhere in a language other than English, please make available two copies of the non-English version. Concentric may not consider submissions already available in other languages.
One copy of the Journal and fifteen off-prints of the article will be provided to the author(s) on publication.
It is the Journal's policy to require assignment of copyrights form by all authors.

CFP: Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

2010-02-20T11:47:00.002-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

COLD WAR CULTURES:
TRANSNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

30 SEPTEMBER - 3 OCTOBER 2010, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 1 APRIL 2010
WWW.COLDWARCULTURES.ORG

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
MUHSIN JASSIM AL-MUSAWI (ARABIC LITERATURE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)
KATE BROWN (HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE)
AMBASSADOR ROBERT HUTCHINGS (LBJ SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, UT AUSTIN) JOHN
D. KELLY (ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO)

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then Cold War politics can be seen as a continuation of war by other means. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore these means in the context of global encounters between states and "Blocs" as well as engagements with "East" and "West." Indeed, after the end of the Second World War, a new kind of "war" continued and expanded as governments and/or interest groups created and continually reshaped institutions, media, popular culture, and various elements of social and political life. Globally, these broad-based transformations took place in the shadow of Cold War politics, especially as expressed through rhetoric of threat and mutual annihilation. In particular, cultural phenomena shaped by Cold War power conflicts take on myriad forms in a host of geographic contexts, both in and outside the Bloc, from iconic public representations to distinctive media advertising, memorable political speeches, world expositions, spy novels and films, and a plethora of official and popular modes of expression. In some places, of course, military or paramilitary conflagrations translated Cold War politics into "hot" wars, which further fueled the fire of Cold War imaginations.

We invite proposals for individual 20-minute papers that explore any geographic area or disciplinary field of Cold War studies, as well as contributions that might engage the notion the of "Cold War" theoretically. Full panels of three papers may also be proposed (however, please submit all papers and biographies for full panels together in a single email).

SUBMISSIONS
Deadline: April 1, 2010
Submit your abstract of 150-200 words in an email (no attachments) to coldwarcultures@gmail.com.
Put "ABSTRACT: Cold War Conference" in the subject line of the email.
Include a brief biographical statement (max. 150 words) in the email.

POSSIBLE PAPER & PANEL TOPICS
* Material and consumer cultures
* Popular culture and everyday life
* Borders, walls, and the Iron Curtain
* Surveillance, torture and show trials
* Literature, music, art and architecture, film and other media
* The space and arms races
* Commodities, trade and the environment
* Cold War client states, arms dealing and proxy wars
* Spies and intelligence communities (in fact or fiction)
* Dissidents and defections
* "Neutral" sites, nonalignment, and the intersection of North-South and East-West dynamics
* International institutions and Trans-national networks

DETAILS
* No registration fee for the conference; open to the public. *
Conference will open on Thursday, September 30, with a keynote address and sessions will continue until noon on Sunday, October 3. *
Conference sessions will be held in classrooms with standard media podia allowing for playing of DVDs, CDs, and PowerPoints. Include a note in your email if you need any other form of media.
* Attendees who are not giving papers are encouraged to register for the conference mailing list by sending an email to coldwarcultures@gmail.com and putting "INFORMATION REQUEST: Cold War Conference" in the subject line of the email.
* A block of rooms will be reserved at a local hotel for participants' convenience.
* For presenters with limited resources, it may be possible to arrange space with local hosts.

This conference is the centerpiece in a series of several events on the UT campus, all of which are free and open to the public. Plans include a Cold War Film Series, curated and introduced by members of the UT faculty and multiple keynotes during the conference, representing the geopolitical and cultural interests of the UT Centers and Institutes.

For more information, consult the conference website at www.coldwarcultures.org OR contact the organizing committee at coldwarcultures@gmail.com.

Major Conference Sponsors at the University of Texas at Austin:
* Center for European Studies
* Center for Middle Eastern Studies
* Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
* South Asia Institute/Center for East Asian Studies
* Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies

CFP: University of Malaya Conference on Discourse and Society (UMDS2010)

2010-02-06T08:55:00.000-05:00

This one is coming up soon--the deadline is February 14!

University of Malaya Conference on Discourse and Society (UMDS2010)
Theme: Interdisplinary Approaches to Discourse
June 16-18, 2010
Hilton Hotel, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Call for papers

UMDS2010 Website: http://umconference.um.edu.my/UMDS2010

The Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Malaya is pleased to announce the University of Malaya Conference on Discourse and Society (UMDS2010) which will be held at Hilton Hotel, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The conference aims to bring together scholars from various disciplines to exchange ideas as well as offer new perspectives and directions in research on discourse and society. We welcome papers from any topic in the field of discourse and especially those that focus on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives of discourse. Areas of interest include:
- Discourse and Education
- Discourse and Gender
- Discourse and Multimodality
- Discourse and Workplace
- Discourse and Religion
- Discourse and Globalisation
- Discourse and the Environment
- Discourse and Technology
- Discourse and Politics
- Intercultural Discourses
- Minority Discourses
- Other related areas of research in discourse and society

Keynote Speakers
Professor Emeritus dato' Dr. Asmah Haji Omar (University of Malaya)
Professor Ruth Wodak (University of Lancaster)
Professor Theo van Leeuwen (University of Sydney)

Submissions are invited for abstracts for oral presentations. All abstracts should be limited to 300 words in either English or Bahasa Malaysia and must be sent to umdsabstracts [at] gmail.com by 14 February 2010.
Paper presentations will be 20 minutes in duration with an additional 10 minutes for discussion. Papers accepted for presentation will be notified by April 16, 2010.

For more information please contact: umds2010 [at] gmail.com

CFP: Civilisation and Fear: Writing and the Subject/s of Ideology

2009-12-24T01:17:00.000-05:00

Just in time for Christmas...

Civilisation and Fear: Writing and the Subject/s of Ideology
Conference Call for Papers
22-25 September 2OlO
Ustron, Poland

***
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.27-3O)
***

What Eliot voices here is, no doubt, his fear and, simultaneously, concern about the prospects of European civilisation as he saw it in the first decades of the 2Oth c. Eliot's lines carry eschatological overtones, too. Do we fear the end of our civilisation, or the condition it has reached at present? What is the connection between fear and civilisation? Are we still waiting for the barbarians? Do we have more fear of the real or the virtual? Should we, perhaps, opt for the positive senses of fear whose presence may testify to the mystery human life is, or brings to light the limitations which human life involves? Can we possibly conquer our fears by writing about them, and redefining their sources? Aren't we – as individuals, citizens, family members, superiors and inferiors, natives and strangers, bodies and spirits – our own fears writ large?

This call for papers is not intended to alarm or intimidate anyone. We extend a cordial invitation to all scholars who take genuine interest in any of the issues raised in the title of the conference as well as those listed below. Our aim is to address a multiplicity of concerns which often coincide and intersect in modern discourses (including literary and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, religious studies, art and others). However, we propose to consider writing (both literary and non-literary) as a window onto, and a meeting ground for, the following themes:

• Arts & literature: the future of arts; literatures of terror; artistic (literary) modes (genres) of terror; the terrific/horrific sublime; (limits of) self-fashioning and self-expression; anxiety of influence in the age of parody, travesty and appropriation

• Civilisation & technology: fear of modernisation & of acceleration; clashes of civilisations; the fearful interplay between culture and nature; man vis-à-vis machine (e.g., threats to humanness, simulacra of the human as source of anxiety, "new" humanity)

• Politics & ideology: enslavement, subjection, subordination through discourses; the "fearful asymmetry": discourses & practices of the modern state (intersections of the political and the personal); democracy, liberty(ies), religion: from orthodoxy to fundamentalism and back, the self of ideology

• Discourses: thanatophobia and the postmodern condition; religious studies as a necessary/contingent by-product of recent traumas; fear and/of metaphysics; power and its institutions as forces prescribing discourses of the self

• Identity / the self: phobias of exposure to fear and trauma; the threatened/shifting selfhood & competing models of subjectivity; the sub/un/conscious; the Lacanian Real

We invite all delegates to deliver 20-minute presentations. Abstracts of the presentations should not exceed 200 words and should be submitted electronically to civilizationandfear[at]gmail.com by March 31, 2010.

For further details please visit: http://www.fear.us.edu.pl

Registration
The registration form will be attached to the first Circular (to be sent to prospective participants in April) and will be also available from our website. The registration fee will not exceed $150 (inclusive of access to all conference events, delegate bag, mid-session refreshments, seminar room hire, and the publication of conference proceedings). As you receive this, our negotiations with prospective sponsors are under way, and we expect to be able to reduce the fee. You will be notified of any alterations in this regard.

Organisers
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
University of Silesia
ul. S. Grota-Roweckiego 5
41-205 Sosnowiec
Poland
in cooperation with
The Committee on Literature Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
Chair of the Organising Committee
Prof. Wojciech Kalaga
Secretary of the Organising Committee
Anna Chromik
civilizationandfear@gmail.com
Plenary speakers
Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson – IFiS, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Prof. Jeremy Tambling – University of Manchester, UK
Prof. Horst Ruthrof – Murdoch University, Australia

Venue
The conference will take place in Ustroń, Poland. Details will be included in the conference circulars. We estimate that full board and accommodation should not exceed 150 PLN per day (ca $50). Detailed get-to information will be posted in the forthcoming circular.

Contact us at: civilizationandfear@gmail.com
For further details please visit: http://www.fear.us.edu.pl

CFP: Thomas R. Watson Conference: Working English in Rhetoric and Composition

2009-12-23T02:35:00.001-05:00

Thomas R. Watson Conference
Working English in Rhetoric and Composition:
Contexts, Commitments, Consequences
October 14-16, 2010
Louisville, KY

The eighth biennial Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition solicits proposals that examine the working of rhetoric and composition in the era of the globalization and localization of English.
How can and do we work English (that is, employ, construct, and redesign it) in the process of learning and using it?
How can we best make English work (that is, make it operate and function) effectively and equitably in public deliberations, cultural expressions, and educational practices?
How do competing notions of the workings of the English language (that is, notions of its formation, apparatus, relations to other languages, and relations to the shaping of individual-collective selves and lives) affect teaching and research in rhetoric and composition?
What different inflections of work and class are implied by these competing notions of working English?
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: Mar 1, 2010

For more information, visit our website: http://louisville.edu/conference/watson Email Min-Zhan Lu, conference director: watson[at]louisville.edu Or call: (502) 852-1252

CFP: RCIA International Symposium on Culture and Political Economy: New Perspectives

2009-12-21T10:56:00.002-05:00

2010 RCIA International Symposium on
Culture and Political Economy: New Perspectives

Jointly Organized by the Research Center for International Affairs, Wenzao, Taiwan and SOAS, University of London, UK

Call for Papers

Paper submissions are invited for the 2010 RCIA International Symposium on Culture and Political Economy: New Perspectives, which is to be held at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, Kaohsiung, Taiwan from Friday, September 17th to Sunday, September 19th 2010.

This conference intends to bring the interdisciplinary dialogues and problems between international cultural studies and political economy to the fore. Through analyses of international cultural/politico-economic issues at the theoretical and empirical levels, it aims to delineate the mutually enhancive and/or conflicting relations of the two in the global/local conjunctures of recent history and the present time.
The following issues and directions will form the major sessions:

1. Reinterpreting Global Political Economy: Culture as an Explicandum or Methodology?
* Modelling the Patterns of Political Economic and Cultural Change
* Critical Survey of Cultural Interpretations of Key Terms in International Political Economy
* Constructivism: Identity and Culture in International Political Economy

2. Cultural Factors in Economy
* Religious, Ethical and Ideological Factors in Economic Growth
* Historical and Contemporary Trends in the Relations between Economic Development and Cultural Change
* Cultural Dependencies? Asian Values and Little Dragons Revisited

3. Soft Power and Foreign Policies
* Clashes of Civilizations and Beyond
* Local/Global Networks: Guanxi as a Way of Soft Power?
* Culture beyond the Nation: International Relations in a World of Regions and Changing Frontiers.
* Cultural Diplomacy in the East and West

4. Cultural Engineering and the Regime of Global Knowledge
* Cultural Enlightenment as a Prerequisite to Long-term East Asian Political Economic Development.
* A Common Cultural Model between Japan, China and the advancing East Asian Systems
* Technology and Media in Global Political Economy
* Values, Religious Ethics and Regime of Useful Knowledge
* Museums, Power Display, and the Return of National Cultural Treasures

5. Organization Culture and New Cultural Economy
* McDonaldisation? Patterns of Enterprise Culture and Behaviours
* The Growing New Cultural Industries and Economy
* Cultural and Economic Impact of Mega-events and Festivals in Global Cities
* Economic or Cultural Wars? The Cultural Dispute between WTO and UNESCO

6. Prospect of the Culture-Political-Economic Synergy
* Cultural Transformation as the Key Element of Stability in International Political Economy
* Analysing the Immeasurables? Probing the Synergy of Cultural Political Economy

Paper proposals (all in English) containing title, abstract of 300-500 words, contact information and affiliation should be sent no later than January 15th 2010 electronically to one of the following: organizer Professor Jerry Liu, Wenzao Ursuline College of Language at jerryliu@mail.wtuc.edu.tw; co-organizer Professor Ian Inkster, Nottingham Trent University, UK at ian@inkster.org.uk; co-organizer Professor Stephan Chan, School of African and Oriental Studies, UK at sc5@soas.ac.uk. For further details of the conference please visit the website of Research Center of International Affairs at http://www.rcia.org.tw/. Final papers must be received no later than August 25th 2010 and should also be submitted electronically.

發佈日期：2009/12/19
聯絡人：Dr. Jerry Liu 劉俊裕副教授
聯絡電話：07-3426031 Ext. 6102, 6121
相關網址：http://www.rcia.org.tw/
E-Mail：jerryliu@mail.wtuc.edu.tw

CFP: The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination

2009-12-21T03:14:00.000-05:00

Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences
National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Call for Papers / 2010 International Conference
The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination

4th International Conference of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 16-17 October 2010, 80424 Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Through history, cities and their inhabitants are locations of encounters between peoples, the trade of goods and services, the evolution of various forms of urban space, and the production of culture and technology. Cities continue to reproduce a series of familiar "common places," each a site of shared memory: centers of government and other public buildings; places of worship and other sacred spaces; neighborhoods and other residential areas; markets and other commercial zones; and public spaces such as squares, monuments, and parks. Throughout history, many cities are located at oceans and the conference's theme of the city and migration is understood in relation to the ocean. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of global megacities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centers. This expanded landscape of the city and urbanities -- here in relation to cities located at the ocean -- suggests to both re-imagine and to re-member the city where memory functions to organize aspects of the city in its now increased pluralistic globalized cultural context. With the movements and flux of (im)migrants, exiles and refugees, climate refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, alternative or countercultural groupings, etc. continue to contest and complicate the ways in which cities articulate their pluralized identities and societies through literature, history, architecture, social function, and various forms of artistic and cultural production. Papers in the conference examine the problematics of urban identities in cities at the ocean in the context of memory, (im)migration, and imagination in order to offer interpretations on the multiple and parallel versions of the city today.

Abstracts of papers in 200 words with CV are invited by 15 February 2010 to Professor I-Chun Wang at chsc705[at]mail.nsysu.edu.tw. Revised and peer-reviewed long versions of the conference papers are planned to be published in the National Sun Yat-sen University Humanities and Social Sciences Monograph Series and participants in the conference are required to submit their papers after the conference.

Proposals are welcomed, but not limited to the following topics and areas:
Between ocean and city
Ocean and migration
Geography and literature
Landscape and cityscape
Cross-Atlantic or cross-Pacific travel
Harbor city and Maritime city
City and human rights
City, ocean and war
Slaveship
Travel
Geopolitics
Maritime material culture
City and maritime history
Navy and sea battle
Seafaring
Maritime heritage
Seapower
Translantic Trade
Men of the sea
Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan 國立中山大學人文社會科學研究中心 [Tel] +886-7-5252000 ext.3241 [Fax]+886-7-5250818 [E-mail] chsc705@mail.nsysu.edu.tw [Web] http://humanitiescenter.nsysu.edu.tw

CFP: Power & Knowledge 2010, Tampere, Finland

2009-12-08T23:20:00.000-05:00

Power & Knowledge
The 2nd International Conference, Tampere, September 6-8, 2010
Call for Session Proposals

Inspired by the great success of the first conference (Power: Forms, Dynamics and Consequences, September 22-24, 2008), we carry on probing questions of power. This time the conference concentrates on the links between power and knowledge.

As is well known, Michel Foucault argued that power and knowledge are like two sides of the same coin. There are however many other approaches and research traditions that tackle the role of knowledge production in affecting and constituting power relations.

What are the roles of science, research and research-based knowledge production in promoting policy models? Does scientific research or evidence-based consultancy save the world and lead us to a better future? What effects does the key role of knowledge production in contemporary societies have on power and politics? How are the established databases and statistical classifications of the public and private organizations constructed and reproduced? What is the role of everyday knowledge in society? What is the relationship between knowledge and resistance?

By bringing together scholars who approach these questions from different angles this conference will advance our understanding about power relations in social reality.

Keynote speakers will include:
- Patrick Carroll
- Gili S. Drori
- Susan Haack
- Sakari Hänninen
- Michael Mann
- Yuval Millo
- Soile Veijola
- (to be announced)

To send a session proposal and to get more information about the conference, please email a session title and abstract (100-200 words describing the session) to power2010@uta.fi

The conference website is in
http://www.uta.fi/power2010/

The latest day to submit the proposal is January 31st 2010. Call for papers will be launched after approved sessions are confirmed.

Welcome to Tampere!

Risto Heiskala
Professor, Director
Chair of the Organizing Committee

CFP: The Asian Conference on the Social Sciences

2009-12-07T03:07:00.000-05:00

via

"East Meets West in Pursuit of a Sustainable World"

The theme of the Inaugural Asian Conference on the Social Sciences is 'East Meets West. For more than a decade, sustainability has emerged a global issue for business and industry, government, and academia. Historically, sustainability has been associated with environmental concerns such as the energy crisis and global warming. Today, however, it is recognized that social/economic justice is equally important to achieving a sustainable future. Thus, issues such as poverty, hunger, education, health care, and access to markets should be a part of the evolution of any comprehensive sustainability paradigm. The conference will address these various dimensions of human sustainability.

Conference Chair:

Professor June M. Henton, Ph.D.
Dean, College of Human Sciences, Auburn University, USA

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference's theme is 'East Meets West in Pursuit of a Sustainable World' and the organizers encourage submissions that approach this questions from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome and we also encourage submissions within and across a variety of disciplines and fields related to the Social Sciences, including the following:

* Anthropology, Archaeology, Cultural Studies and Humanities
* Media and Communications
* Economics and Management
* Education and Social Welfare
* Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender
* Natural, Environmental and Health Sciences
* Politics, Public Policy and Law
* Psychology, Cognitive Science and the Behavioral Sciences
* Research Methodologies, Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
* Sociology and Geography
* Technology and Applied Sciences
* Other Areas of Social Sciences, including interdisciplinary research.

NB Abstracts should be 250-500 words in length and will be blind reviewed by a voluntary team of peer reviewers. Authors are limited to one abstract submission, whether as lead or secondary author. Please apply through the online system at www.acss.iafor.org

Conference Deadlines

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 January 2010
Results of abstract reviews returned to authors: 5 February 2010
Deadline for submission of full papers: 1 April 2010
Deadline for full conference registration payment for all presenters: 1 May 2010
ACSS Conference: 18-21 June 2010

CFP: The Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities

2009-12-07T03:06:00.000-05:00

via

Theme: "East Meets West"

The theme of the Inaugural Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities is 'East Meets West', which is a response to the ongoing process of globalization and its implications. It offers an opportunity to search for similarities of ideas that may enhance international understanding on the one hand and for differences in culture that may have to be accepted as irreconcilable on the other. Racial and religious disagreement, culturally contrasting ways of dealing with social, economic, and political problems, exacerbated by the forces of globalization, combine to exert enormous pressure on the systems that have been created to manage human affairs on this planet. This conference is dedicated to the cross-cultural exploration of the interconnectedness of the central questions involved in order to generate new ideas and fresh approaches that will be relevant and constructive as support for the emerging generation of thinkers, educators, and global leaders.

Conference Chair:

The Reverend Professor Stuart D.B. Picken
Order of the Sacred Treasure, B.D., Ph.D., F.R.A.S.
Chairman, Japan Society of Scotland

Keynote Speaker:

Lord Charles Bruce
Lord Lieutenant of Fife
Chairman of the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland Trustee of the Historic Scotland Foundation
Honorary patron of the Japan Society of Scotland

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference's theme is 'East Meets West' and the organizers encourage submissions that approach this questions from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome and we also encourage submissions within and across a variety of disciplines and fields related to Arts and Humanities, including the following:

Anthropology
American Studies
Archeology
Architecture
Art
Art History
Dance
English
Ethnic Studies
Film
Folklore
Geography
Graphic Design
History
Landscape Architecture
Languages
Literature
Linguistics
Music
Performing Arts
Philosophy
Postcolonial Identities
Religion
Second Language Studies
Speech/Communication
Theatre
Visual Arts
Other Areas of Arts and Humanities, including interdisciplinary research.

NB Abstracts should be 250-500 words in length and will be blind reviewed by a voluntary team of peer reviewers. Authors are limited to one abstract submission, whether as lead or secondary author. Please apply through the online system at www.acah.iafor.org

Proceedings Submission Deadlines

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 January 2010
Results of abstract reviews returned to authors: 5 February 2010
Deadline for submission of full papers: 1 April 2010
Deadline for full conference registration payment for all presenters: 1 May 2010
ACAH Conference: 18-21 June 2010

CFP: Engaging Students in the Global Century

2009-12-07T03:03:00.000-05:00

via

The New York Institute of Technology announces its sixth interdisciplinary conference, "Engaging Students in the Global Century." Scholars from a range of disciplines are invited to interpret the theme broadly for this one-day conference at NYiT's Columbus Circle campus on Friday, March 19, 2010.

The conference, as in past years, will draw scholars from around the country and world for panel discussions, featured speakers, and lively conversation. Keynote speakers, such as author Mark Kurlansky, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and historians Marta Gutman and Kenneth T. Jackson, have added to the depth of past conferences.

Possible themes for papers:
Strategies and experiences related to incorporating Web 2.0 technologies, including Wikis, social networking sites, blogs, and virtual reality platforms, into the undergraduate classroom
New ideas in instructional design and teaching strategies for online learning
Plans for developing and implementing successful undergraduate research programs, particularly in the humanities and arts
Addressing students as global citizens and creating community across global campuses
Problems and solutions connected to collaborative learning
Critiques and questions related to new technologies, intergenerational dynamics, or ethical concerns involved with 21st-century teaching and learning.

Please send a 500-word abstract and C.V. to Jennifer Griffiths at jgriff02 [at] nyit.edu by January 15, 2010.

Jennifer Griffiths
NYiT, Manhattan Campus
1855 Broadway
NY NY 10023
212-261-1580

Email: jgriff02[at}nyit.edu

CFP: American Studies Association of Turkey Conference

2009-11-15T11:21:00.003-05:00

American Studies Association of Turkey
34th International American Studies Conference

The Art of Language: Cultural Expressions in American Studies

November 3-5, 2010
Alanya, Turkey

Confirmed Speakers:
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
Cherrie Moraga
Celia Herrera Rodriguez

According to American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thought is the blossom; language the bud; and action the fruit behind it." Without language in all of its forms-oral, written, visual, and symbolic-there would be no way to translate thoughts into political action or personal expression. In many branches of American Studies, language itself has become a form of art-the vehicle through which those in the mainstream and in the margins have communicated their histories, cultures and visions of the future. Socially-constructed and thus almost always political in nature, language not only allows individuals to develop an understanding of their environment(s), but also permits them to engage in the shaping of their own landscapes.

Language is thus intrinsic to the expression of culture. Not only does it convey values, beliefs and customs, but it also has an important social function in that it fosters sentiments of collective identity and solidarity. It is the means through which culture and its traditions are preserved and transferred from generation to generation. Consequently, as languages disappear, cultures, and their numerous layers of representation, also wither away and die, for gone are the mechanisms that translate thought into experience. Conversely, language also has the power to produce and unite, serving as the currency for cross-cultural exchange, the adaptation of new rites and rituals, and the transformation of individuals into global citizens.

The American Studies Association of Turkey invites proposals that consider the art of language as a cultural expression, broadly conceived. We particularly encourage abstracts which incorporate transdisciplinary explorations of the subject, and welcome submissions from any branch of American Studies. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
Music as a language of cultural expression
Indigenous languages and cultures/language revitalization
Multilingualism/multiculturalism
The politics of language and culture
Trans or intercultural languages
English as the global language/"American" as the global culture?
Cultural expression in speech behavior
Cultural outcomes/products of language (hybridity, creolization, metissage, mestizaje)
The manipulation of language for cultural/political purposes
Race, language and culture
Semiotics/semantics/sign language
Visual language/visual culture/aesthetics
The visual word (comic books/graphic novels/political cartoons)
Art, language and culture
Literature and cultural expression
Food and clothing as cultural expressions
Ecolinguistics
Performance as a language of cultural expression
Oral traditions (griots, storytelling, folktales, street poetry) as cultural expressions
Domestic arts (quilting, weaving, pottery, and needlework) as cultural expressions
Language and American identity
The body as a language of cultural expression
Self-writing (travel writing, journals, diaries, and memoirs) as cultural expressions
Translation/interpretation/adaptation of language
Language as cultural resistance/subversion
Design/architecture as languages of cultural expression
Artificial languages/constructed languages/technolanguages
Pedagogical applications of language and culture
The limits of language, especially for cultural expression
The time allowance for all presentations is 20 minutes. An additional 10 minutes will be provided for discussion.

Proposals for papers, panels, performances, exhibits, and other modes of creative expression should be sent to Tanfer Emin Tunc (asat2007 [at] gmail.com) and should consist of a 250-300 word abstract in English, as well as a 1-2 paragraph biographical description for each participant.

Deadline for submission of proposals: April 30, 2010
Notification for acceptance of proposals: August 1, 2010

More information will be posted on our website as it becomes available: http://simplifyurl.com/4b0

In Cooperation with the Embassy of the United States and the City of Alanya

CFP: Linguistics for intercultural education in language learning and teaching

2009-11-06T05:10:00.005-05:00

(source)

Call for chapters
(deadline for abstracts: 1st March 2010)
Linguistics for intercultural education in language learning and teaching

Editors:
Fred Dervin
Adjunct Professor in sociology (University of Joensuu Finland)
Adjunct Professor in Language and Intercultural Education
(University of Turku Finland)

Anthony J. Liddicoat
Professor of Applied Linguistics (University of South Australia)

According to Daniel Coste (1989), the field of language education consists of a vast array of direct and indirect discourses on language teaching and learning as held by various actors (teachers, researchers, publishers, scientific and professional associations… ). As such, the field is complex and multifaceted. This volume is interested in one aspect of language learning and teaching, intercultural education, and the role that linguistics can play in its design and implementation. The relationship between linguistics and language education has varied over time and most recently, linguistics has played a more reduced role in developing theory and practice in language education, especially where views of the nature of language teaching and learning have moved beyond simple code based views. This means that while fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy have had a clear influence on theory, practices and research directions for intercultural education, there have been relatively few attempts at linking linguistics and intercultural education.

In language education, the learner has now become a real "subject" – a subject who is at the centre of learning and teaching; a subject who is taught to be responsible for his/her learning; a subject who interacts; a subject who is required to be both performer and analyser of language in use. The emergence of an intercultural perspective in language education has had a significant role to play in allowing these changes. Many researchers such as Abdallah-Pretceille, Byram, Kramsch, Zarate… have called for systematic integration of work on intercultural communication and the development of intercultural capabilities in language classrooms. Though their approaches and theoretical backgrounds often differ, their main message seems to be the same: language educationalists need to move away from an educational approach which consists in building up facts about a "target culture", comparing "cultures" and analysing the cultural routines and meanings of a particular group of people and overemphasizes national/ethnic identities and cultural differences in an objectivist perspective.

These scholars seem to agree that "culturalism" (or the use of culture in an uncritical and systematic way to explain intercultural encounters) tends to give a very objectivist-differentialist vision of "cultures"; it also corresponds to "analytical stereotyping" (Sarangi) and ignores the postmodern understanding that identities are multiple and co-constructed – even within the self. This is why methodologies which consist of "soft" content analysis, which merely paraphrase what the Other or the Self have to say to serve as evidence of "culture", need to be questioned. In attempting to move intercultural language education beyond superficial ways of understanding the intercultural, methods such as participant-observation, self-reflexive essays, roleplays, simulations, and even "stays abroad" have been used for allowing learners to develop what most authors call "intercultural competence" (Byram, 2008). Such activities are developed as opportunities for students to develop reflexive and critical skills yet, how the students build up these skills through such activities is often less well explored.

One of the main problems facing intercultural education is our heavy reliance on interpreting and understanding discourses and actions. Discourses are unstable and do not always correspond to actions. These problems call for different ways of understanding and analysing learners' relations to interculturality and their discourses on the self, the "same" and the other. The analysis of language can allow people to examine how they construct/co-construct themselves and others through the discourses they use and encounter. Faced with unstable and contradictory discourses and actions, learners need the resources to analyse both their construction and their (in)consistency. We believe that linguistics has a role in developing more sophisticated understandings of the nature of the intercultural in language education.

One of the reasons that linguistics has been seen as having little relevance to interculturally oriented language education is that it has often been perceived as being concerned with formal descriptions of autonomous linguistics systems, however, linguistics, just like language education, has evolved massively since the 1970s. In a very similar vein to other human sciences, new approaches in linguistics have emerged which give greater emphasis to language in use, to the culturally embedded nature of language, to the role of context, to interaction, and to analysing the ways discourses are (co)created and negotiated between interlocutors.

Some of the linguistic approaches that may serve as tools for understanding and researching intercultural language learning and teaching include, but are not limited to:
Conversation analysis
Critical discourse analysis
Dialogism
Discourse analysis
Ethnography of communication
Interactional sociolinguistics
Membership categorization analysis
Positioning theory
Pragmatics
Reconstruction method
Rhetoric
Semantics
Semiotics
Theories of enunciation
Theory of prediscourse.
The editors of this volume believe strongly that linguistics has a lot to offer to both language and intercultural educationalists and researchers. This volume aims to present a range of investigations of intercultural language teaching and learning which demonstrate how linguistics can contribute to understanding the field. Focusing on any field of language education (primary, secondary, higher education, lifelong learning, adult education… ), the contributors will examine how teachers and researchers use linguistics to promote and research interculturality in language education. Possible topics to be covered include the role and use of linguistics in:
language and intercultural education in the classroom;
in computer-mediated language learning and teaching;
in informal language learning contexts;
in teacher education (pre-service or in-service);
in preparation for study abroad;
in assessing intercultural capabilities;
in combination with other disciplinary approaches to develop interdisciplinary perspectives on intercultural language education.
CFP: November 2009
Deadline for submitting proposals: 1st March 2010
Decisions: 15th April 2010
Chapters to be handed in by 15th September 2010

Potential authors are invited to submit a 300-word proposal (including a few lines about the author(s)) in English to both editors by 1st March 2010 (freder@utu.fi & Tony.Liddicoat@unisa.edu.au). The proposals should clearly explain the theoretical framework and concerns of the proposed chapter, and include a short description of a corpus (where applicable). A basic bibliography may also be added. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by 15th April 2010. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by September 15th 2010. The book is scheduled to be published in autumn 2011 by an international publisher. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a blind review basis.

Tremor...

2009-11-05T04:52:00.004-05:00

That was a long one--seemed to go for at least 30 seconds (but I'm not sure). [The TV news said it lasted a minute, but they're also saying it was 7.0 at its epicenter, so I don't know...] I was just starting to read the preface to Vicki Tolar Burton's Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley's Methodism (see, I keep up with what's going on at SU) and I'd gotten to the part where she's describing an engraving of John Wesley's deathbed scene, and... boom! Now I'm afraid to open the book again!

[Update:] According to the Central Weather Bureau, it was two tremors--one at 5:32 and one at 5:38 p.m. I must have felt the first one because I started writing this post at 5:35 p.m.--that was a 6.0, centered in Nantou. (The USGS says it was a 5.7.)

[7:36 p.m.update:] Yet another one just hit. A very short one, though. I saw on the news that someone from the Central Weather Bureau was saying these were adjustments (aftershocks?) related to the 921 earthquake that happened 10 years ago. (!)

Dead pigeons

2009-11-05T02:10:00.002-05:00

No, this isn't the name of a new punk band--I'm just noting the fact that I have seen two dead pigeons today. This morning we saw one lying outside the KFC on the corner of Taichung Harbor Rd. & Huichung Rd. At the time, I thought maybe it had flown into the plate glass window and died.

Later, when I was walking to my classroom an hour ago, I saw another dead pigeon lying next to a tree. They were both about average size, probably adults (though I don't know for sure). Just surprised to see two dead pigeons in one day. Hopefully it's a coincidence...

Reminder to work this sentence into a paper

2009-11-04T04:22:00.001-05:00

"The poetics of history as such invests itself in the legitimation of the nation-state."

(Source)

Speaking of confusion...

2009-10-12T07:37:00.000-04:00

I just sent the same (wrong) file to one of the committees I'm on ... three times. Finally got the right version of the file to them on the fourth try. (And why do I seem to be bragging about this?)

In other news, I went to a conference in Kumamoto, Japan (IAICS) a few weeks ago. Here are two pictures I used in my PowerPoint for the presentation (no, I didn't talk to my PowerPoint, and I tried to look at my audience).

The pictures were taken from Tunghai University--The First Ten Years. Tunghai University, Nov. 2, 1964. (Courtesy Tunghai University Special Collections)

These are some Shansi reps working with Tunghai students, probably in the mid 1950s. I bet they didn't send the wrong file to their colleagues over & over again...

Here's a shot of Tunghai, with the central mountains in the background.

This is cool, but confusing...

2009-10-08T10:55:00.000-04:00

via

I didn't realize that Taiwan's military had the Decepticons on its side. Does that mean the Autobots are Communists? But the Decepticons are the ones with the red eyes... I'm so confused...

(Yeah, I know it's too wide, but I don't care...)

This doesn't look particularly friendly...

2009-10-01T04:42:00.003-04:00

Balto. Co. Council speed camera vote set -- baltimoresun.com

2009-09-02T07:01:00.002-04:00

Balto. Co. Council speed camera vote set -- baltimoresun.com

Posted using ShareThis

(My favorite lines from people opposed to the speed cameras: "Tickets will go to faceless recipients in an unwarranted exploitation of rights." And "This is Orwellian, and it limits personal freedom." Folks, these are about speed cameras for in front of schools. No one's talking about limiting your personal "right" to drive 100 mph on 83...)

Taiwanfeed.com site compromised?

2009-08-14T12:03:00.002-04:00

I just tried going to the Taiwanfeed.com website. I got a warning from Google and the "Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page" for Taiwanfeed says,

What is the current listing status for taiwanfeed.com?
Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.
Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 1 time(s) over the past 90 days.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 1 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 1 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-08-09, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-08-09.
Malicious software includes 1 scripting exploit(s).
Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including coumter.cn/.
This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS26347 (DREAMHOST).
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, taiwanfeed.com did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.
How did this happen?
In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message.

My antivirus program also told me that the site was trying to download a Trojan Horse program called "HTML:IFrame-GG [Trj]".

Has anyone else experienced this?

More about Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations

2009-08-08T23:47:00.004-04:00

I mentioned last night that I thought The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World by Vijay Prashad would be a good book for students of transnational rhetoric (or rhetoric and transnationalism). The reason for this is that the Third World "project" that Prashad depicts in his book was arguably a rhetorical project, one in which the leaders of newly (and some not-yet) independent states worked together to try to craft an alternative to domination by US or Soviet power and ideology. As Indonesian President Sukarno argued at the 1955 Bandung Conference, the newly independent states' lack of economic and military strength left them with few alternatives for resisting imperialism. However, he argued, "[w]e can inject the voice of reason into world affairs. We can mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace" (qtd in Prashad 34).

Prashad makes extensive use of the documents that came from meetings and conferences run and attended by leaders of the non-aligned movement in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The deliberations done at these conferences were important to the rhetorical project of the Third World.

The Afro-Asian meetings in Bandung and Cairo (1955 and 1961, respectively), the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade (1961), and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana rehearsed the major arguments within the Third World project so that they could take them in a concerted way to the main stage, the United Nations. In addition, the new states pushed the United Nations to create institutional platforms for their Third World agenda: the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was the most important of these institutions, but it was not the only one. Through these institutions, aspects other than political equality came to the fore: the Third World project included a demand for the redistribution of the world's resources, a more dignified rate of return for the labor power of their people, and a shared acknowledgment of the heritage of science, technology, and culture. (xvi-xvii)

Prashad is quick to note, though, that taking speeches like Sukarno's at face value "can be gravely misleading. Most of the documents and speeches are triumphal, and few of them reveal the fissures and contradictions within the Third World" (13). Sukarno's articulation of what came to be called the "Bandung Spirit" was an attempt to assert moral strength in the absence of any other form of power, and despite the moral argument made for disarmament, participants in the Bandung Conference "continued to horde weapons--a fact that led many to charge them of hypocrisy" (43). The rest of Prashad's book is a close look at how "the fissures and contradictions within the Third World"--with the help of organizations like the IMF and the World Bank--undermined the ideals that were represented by the Bandung Spirit. It's a complicated story, but it's well-told in this book. For students of of rhetoric, the book suggests both the possibilities created through discourse and the limits on what rhetoric can do by itself.

Some reviews of The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad

2009-08-08T11:19:00.001-04:00

I've been reading Vijay Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World lately. It's a fascinating book, one that I think people doing work in transnational rhetoric should read. I haven't finished it yet, but I wanted to link to some reviews of the book that I've found on the web.

"A Review of "The Darker Nations" by Saswat Pattanayak on the Crosscurrents.com site
This is a long, generally positive review, though it questions part of Prashad's thesis about the decline of the Third World "project" and points out some areas that need further research.

Review by Jacqui Freeman in Socialist Review
This is a shorter review. Freeman is also generally positive, though she has one criticism that I share: "My criticism would be that, although his sympathies obviously lie with the masses, the vast majority of the book is devoted to discussion of nationalist elites."

Review by Jeffrey McFadden in Political Affairs Magazine

An interview with Prashad by Rohit Chopra, on the SAJAforum website

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity

2009-05-25T05:24:00.001-04:00

website

3rd Global Conference
Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity

Tuesday 10th November - Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers
The relaunch of this multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the new and prominent place that the idea of culture has for the construction of meaning and identity, as well as the implications for social political membership in contemporary societies. In particular the project will assess the larger context of major world transformations, for example, new forms of migration and the massive movements of people across the globe, as well as the impact and contribution of globalisation on tensions, conflicts and the sense of rootedness and belonging. Looking to encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it means for people, the world over, to forge identities in rapidly changing national, social and cultural contexts.

Papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Contemporary Rediscoveries and Redefinitions of Culture
~ Multiple, polyvalent and contradictory conceptions of culture
~ Infinite source of meaning and identity, of membership and exclusion, of privileging and stigmatising, of worth and misery, of place and history, of violence and destruction
~ Cultural remaking of self and other; recasting of links, bonds and relations
~ The contradictory forces of culture: diversity versus homogeneity, multiplicity versus sameness, alterity versus normality, recognition versus misrecognition
~ Textures of cultures: fixed, fluid, porous, hermetic, rigid and flexible

2. Cultural Boundaries, Peoples and Nations
~ Dislocation and decoupling of culture and nation, of culture and place, of culture and history
~ Resurgence of the local, the diminishing importance of the national and the forces of the global
~ What does it mean, today, to be part of a culture, to be part of multiple cultures?
~ Massive and new forms of global migration and the new hybridity of cultures
~ Assimilation, integration, adaptation and other forms of ‘forcing’ cultures on migrants

3. Cultural Formations
~ What are the dynamics and processes that define the central tenets of a culture?
~ How are cultures defined and redefined? Who participates in the social and political task of defining and redefining culture?
~ What is shared from cultures? How are cultures shared? Who has access to the sharing of cultures?
~ Symbols and significations that connect people to cultures other than ‘their own’
~ Culture and the construction of identities: destiny, happenstance, choice and politics

4. Politicising Culture
~ Political battles over the principles and core values of a culture, of many cultures
~ The dynamics of cultural recognition and misrecognition
~ What is the place of cultural claims in today's forms of social and political membership?
~ Trans-cultural connections that escape institutional and political control
~ Cultural claims and human rights

5. Art and Cultural Representations
~ Media and the construction of cultures and identities
~ Production and reproduction of cultural recognition and misrecognition
~ The contested space of representing meaning and identity, culture and belonging
~ Art, media and how to challenge the rigid and impenetrable constructions of culture
~ Living, being and belonging through art; life imitating art and fiction

6. Crossing Cultural Boundaries
~ Interpenetration, overlapping, crossovers, interlacing, hybridisation and interdependence
~ Languages, idioms and new emerging forms of bridging the ‘invisible’ divide of cultures
~ Conceptualisations that foster the breaking down of rigid cultural boundaries
~ Equalising cultures; recognition and respect across cultures
~ How to revamp historically old concepts like tolerance, acceptance and hospitality?
~ An ethics for cultural relations

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 19th June 2009. If your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference, an 8 page draft paper should be submitted by Friday 9th October 2009.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Research Director,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
E-Mail: acc [at] inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom
E-Mail: ic3 [at] inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the 'Diversity and Recognition' research projects, which in turn belong to the 'At the Interface' programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

For further information about the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/diversity-recognition/interculturalism/

For further information about the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/diversity-recognition/interculturalism/call-for-papers/

CFP: 15th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication

2009-05-03T10:39:00.004-04:00

Deadline extended to June 15, 2009

website

Intercultural Communication and Collaboration within and across Sociolinguistic Environments

Final Call for Papers

The 15th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication

September 18-20, 2009
Kumamoto Gakuen University, Japan

The continuing globalization of the world brings ever-increasing opportunities to share knowledge and ideas across sociolinguistic boundaries. This is not simply a matter of the world becoming smaller or more alike--on the contrary, recognition and respect of diversity have become prerequisites in face of the need to understand and get along with each other. Moreover, intercultural sensitivity and accommodation are necessary for successful collaboration towards exchange and resolution of global issues.

The importance of effective communication across different environments has long been recognized; however, it is becoming more apparent that the need for enhanced communication skills to share ideas effectively even within the same sociolinguistic environment is posing an ever increasing challenge. This is at least partly due to the relative decrease in face-to-face communication that has become a dangerous side-effect of the bewildering increase in methods of global communication and the speed of change in the environment itself. The challenge of successful cooperation not only across but also within sociolinguistic and cultural boundaries, then, remains in the limelight today.

This year's conference aims to bring together experts in cross-cultural communication studies with a focus on recognition of the changing communicative environment in which we live and work, with the hope that new ideas and opportunities for collaboration will result. As an interdisciplinary conference on human communication across cultures, the suggested paper topics, therefore, cover a wide range of communication related themes. The following are potential paper topics.

Approaches to intercultural communication study
Business communication across cultures
Communication accommodation
Communication and globalization
Communication education
Computer mediated communication
Conflict and negotiation
Crisis management
Cross-cultural adaptation
Cultural and linguistic diversity
Cultural identity and globalization
Digital communication
Ethnicity and communication
Group or organizational communication across cultures
Harmony and diversity
Health communication across cultures
Information technology and culture
Interpersonal/intercultural communication
Intercultural / global communication competence
Language and cultural education
Language and media
Language and society
Language attitude
Language change and language stability
Language policy
Media and culture
Media literacy
Rhetoric studies
Risk communication across cultures
Theory of intercultural communication from different perspectives
Research methodology in intercultural communication studies
Translation theory
Verbal and nonverbal communication across cultures
Interpersonal communication across cultures

Guidelines for Submission

Categories: Abstracts and panel proposals may be submitted.
Abstract, 150-200 words in English, including affiliations, email addresses and mailing addresses for all authors. See the sample format of the abstract below.
Panel proposal reflecting the conference theme may be submitted. All panel proposals should provide a 100-word rationale and 150 word abstract of each panelist's paper, mailing addresses and email addresses of all panelists.
Deadline: Please submit the abstracts and the complete panel proposals online as an MS Word attachment by June 15, 2009. Completed paper should be done by the time of the conference. Authors will be informed at the conference where to send the completed paper and when the deadline is for the consideration of being published in one of the two issues of the IAICS journal, Intercultural Communication Studies, which will be devoted to conference papers. All submissions will be carefully reviewed.

Conference language: International English

Organizational website: http://www2.kumagaku.ac.jp/teacher/~judy/cgi/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=IAICS.IAICS

Submission to: Judy Yoneoka and/or Yuko Takeshita at iaics2009 [at] kumagaku.ac.jp

Tunghai's water supply threatened

2009-05-01T23:54:00.007-04:00

From the Taiwan News:

The management of Tunghai University in Taichung confirmed yesterday that they had received blackmail threats both yesterday and on Thursday threatening to poison the water on campus. The management revealed that police had retrieved fingerprints from the blackmail letters and are looking for the suspect.

Tunghai University phoned the police upon discovering a blackmail letter at the door of the president's office on Thursday. A phone call was made by an unidentified male yesterday morning to the school, threatening to put poison in campus water. The school immediately shut down the water source.

The blackmailer demanded NT$5 million in cash and 50 taels of gold (about 1850g) from the university in the letter which also included a threat of throwing a chlorine bomb, which is lethal when dissolved in water or in air. A sketch of the design of the chlorine bomb was attached with the letter to prove the blackmailer's bomb-making ability, said the police.

They've turned the water back on here, but as of last night they told us not to drink it.

[Update, 10:50 p.m.: According to an e-mail sent this evening from Tunghai's president, the water towers do not show signs of contamination. The drinking water machines are still not to be used until they are all thoroughly cleaned and their filters replaced. He also hints that some news reports on the incident are not entirely accurate, but says the school administration isn't yet at liberty to go into any detail. Stay tuned for more...]

[Update, 5/3/09: The Taiwan News reports that police have caught a suspect in the extortion plot. As is often the case, closed-circuit video played a role in the arrest:

According to police, Wang had made a series of phone calls the previous two days in which he gave instructions on where the money and gold should be placed.

In one of the phone calls, he asked Tunghai University administrators to relay a demand to seven other universities and colleges in Taichung County that they must each remit NT$80,000 to a designated bank account, or their water supplies would also be poisoned.

Police traced several of the calls to a public phone. They used footage from nearby roadside close-circuit television cameras to find the registration number of the motorcycle used by the person making the phone calls.

After establishing that the suspect was a man living in Daya Township in Taichung County, police zeroed in on him Saturday night.

According to TV news, the suspected extortionist was out of work and had gambling debts.]

CFP: Writing Research Across Borders II

2009-05-01T20:09:00.002-04:00

website

Call for Proposals: Writing Research Across Borders II

George Mason University

February 17-20, 2011

Proposal Deadline May 3, 2010

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research Across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years.

Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research.

As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition's previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims.

Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects.

The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to writing [at] education.ucsb.edu. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker's individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter.

Update on A Pail of Oysters

2009-02-28T20:17:00.009-05:00

This has been quiet for a while, and will probably continue to be quiet for the foreseeable future. But I wanted to mention that after finishing an article a while back on A Pail of Oysters (Vern Sneider's 1953 novel about martial-law Taiwan), I came across a new/old reference to the book. In a 1954 report of a US Senate subcommittee on "Strategy and Tactics of World Communism", former Director of the USIS in China John Caldwell had the following to say about the effects of Communism on the US publishing industry:

The Communists have made use of American naivete to so poison the minds of editors, writers, and publishers and Foreign Service personnel that it is difficult to make an honest decision today on either Nationalist China or Korea. The Department of State, like our courts, operates on a body of precedent. When it is necessary to draft a cable of instructions, an officer goes into the files to see what has been done, what has been reported and advised previously. The files are stacked today with anti-Chiang, anti-Nationalist material. The same situation prevails with respect to Syngman Rhee. Until several years have passed during which we have objective, anti-Communist reporting it will be difficult to expect decisions and actions favorable to our friends in Asia.

Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers suffer in a similar manner. For years Edgar Snow was a prominent editor of the Saturday Evening Post. His pro-Chinese Communist bias is well known. But what has not been recognized is the influence he left behind. The "body of precedent" he bequeathed has undoubtedly had a profound effect upon the Post's selection of articles. As far as I know there has never been a best selling or even moderately well selling book on the Far East basically favorable to our logical allies. There have been numerous books on the other side. These titles have been vigorously promoted and have sold well. This has been the pattern since Thunder Out of China by White and Jacoby became a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1945 until the most recent effort to smear Chiang bookwise appeared in the form of a book titled "A Pail of Oysters" by Vern Sneider. Published last fall this thoroughly dishonest book received rave reviews. In the Saturday Review of Literature it was reviewed by one Pat Frank who stated that the book cast a bright light thrust into the infected peritoneum of Formosa * * * it is a true light." Mr. Frank says that the Nationalists are rightly described as "swine" and concludes his review with the statement that anyone who reads A Pail of Oysters will understand "why all of our money and all our men can't put Chiang Kai-shek together again." Also published last fall, Formosa Beachhead by Geraldine Fitch is a factual, honest account of the tremendous progress made on Formosa, of the promise this progress holds for the mainland of China. Mrs. Fitch's book has been ignored by the reviewers, has sold less than 3,000 copies. (p. 99)

I haven't seen "rave reviews" for Oysters--they seem to have been pretty mixed, in fact. (I'm not surprised the more left-leaning Saturday Review of Literature would have had a positive review of the novel, though.)

Source: Strategy and Tactics of World Communism: Hearing before the Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the US Senate Judiciary Committee, 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., 95 (1954) (testimony of John C. Caldwell). (Available online.)

Update, 3/6/09: More on Caldwell--a brief biographical sketch from another part of the source cited above:

Mr. Caldwell, author of the Korea Story and China Coast Family, is a former State Department official. He was born on the China coast, son of missionary, speaks the Chinese dialects spoken on Formosa. He also speaks Korean. His present reports from the Far East have special value because he can communicate with locals in their language. His China Coast Family is a major book club selection for December. (105)

Article about Doris Brougham in Taipei Times

2008-12-16T03:46:00.002-05:00

Profile of the English teacher/missionary who has been in Taiwan for over half a century

Michael Turton's review of recent Brookings conference on cross-strait relations...

2008-12-04T09:59:00.003-05:00

... confirms to me that my earlier pessimism about the incoming US administration's position on Taiwan isn't too far off.

Michael has a good review of a presentation by Richard Bush, former head of the US's de facto embassy in Taiwan and currently director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. Bush, Michael says, "will no doubt oversee Taiwan policy for the Obama Administration". In his talk, Bush stressed the importance of the "process" in Taiwan-China relations and the importance of "pragmatism". Michael has some choice words for what "process" might actually mean to those emphasizing it:

The emphasis on process resulted, inevitably, in questions from the audience asking what the outcomes would be, or what the benefits of continuing the process might be. Bush dodged these and refused to specify what outcome would be desired or likely. The process was put forth as the goal, suggesting that (1) the Establishment wants to deliver Taiwan to China with a big bow-tie on it since we all know where the KMT is heading; (2) the Establishment thinks that the Taiwan-China diplomatic process is going to be like the Middle East peace process: interminable, and providing plenty of employment for diplomats, hence outcomes are irrelevant; (3) the Establishment thinks the US has little power to influence outcomes; or (4) the Establishment knows that as long as they emphasize process and appear to do China's bidding, China will be happy, while the independence movement in Taiwan will never permit the actual annexation of Taiwan to China. Hence, stalemate, no real loss. The reader may choose; I cannot.

Michael also analyzes what the dual emphasis on "process" and "pragmatism" actually means for the so-called status quo between Taiwan and China:

Many people, including many in the DPP, have expressed fear at the likely negative impact of Obama's China policy on Taiwan. I have to say that I saw nothing to reassure me on that score. Whatever the actual reasons for the Establishment's position, the emphasis on a process that can only result in Taiwan's annexation to China in some form, legitimated by an emphasis on a pragmatism that for practical purposes is ostensibly value-free, cannot be good for Taiwan. Another bit of interesting fall-out is the "ratchet effect" on the status quo -- as the process becomes the status quo, by default, moves away from it and in defense of Taiwan's sovereignty and democracy will be termed status quo violations, while moves toward China, though violations of any rational definition of the status quo, will be applauded.

All in all, rather depressing prospects. I doubt I would have voted for McCain if I were only thinking about Taiwan, but I'm sad at the prospect that the incoming Democrat administration might care as little about Taiwan as the previous administrations have.

CFP: Conference on Human Rights, International Law & Collective Violence

2008-11-13T06:03:00.002-05:00

Very timely...

*International and Interdisciplinary Conference*

Dates: April 17-18 2009

Topic: Human Rights, International Law & Collective Violence

Sponsored by the Center for Spirituality, Ethics and Global Awareness and International Program,

Davis and Elkins College, WV

*Call for Papers
*Deadline for Abstract: *February 20th, 2009*

*Suggested Subtopics:*

Psychology of Violent Group Behavior; Genocide, Rebellion, Cults; Mass Murder; Intentional Criminality and Criminal Violence; Workplace Violence; Collective Violence and Social Pluralism; Collective Violence in Groups and Social Pluralism; Groups and Governments; Violence and Collective Responsibility; Violence and Politics; Bio-Terrorism and Counter Measures; Gender Violence; Collective Identity and Escalation of Ethnic Conflict; Collective Violence and Individual Punishment; Criminality of Mass Atrocity; Computer Ethics and Collective Violence; Violence in Prison; Globalization and International Law; International Environmental Law and Policy; International Human Rights; Terrorism, Pacifism and the Culture of War; Gandhi and the Philosophy of Non-Cooperation; Television, Terrorism and War/Peace Discourse(s); Muslim-Christian Relations in an Age of Terror; Origins of Terrorism (past and present); Arts, War and Peace; Strategies for Peace in a Time of Terror; Peace Narratives in Contemporary Film and Literature; Terror, Politics & Economics; The Internationalization of Terrorism; Violence and Religion Post 9/11; Gandhi and MLK, Jr.: Theories of Resistance and Nonviolence; The Paradox of Violence; Film, War and a Discourse of Dissent; Contemporary Anti-War Poetry; Terrorism: What is it?; Terrorism and the Role of Radical Religions; Suicide Terrorism; The Objectives of Terrorism; Tactics of Terrorism; Terrorism, Targeting, Ethnicity and Race; Homeland Security (Anti-terror Policy); Fundamentalisms, Pluralism and the Conditions for War and Peace; Terrorism & Nationalism; Europe & Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism

- *Selected papers from Conference will be subjected to editorial review*
- There is a small travel fund available for early submissions**

*Contact:*
Chandana Chakrabarti,Ph.D.

Dean of International Program
Director of the Center for Spirituality, Ethics and Global Awareness
Phone: 304-637-1293

E-mail: Chakrabartic@DavisAndElkins.edu
Chandanachak@gmail.com

Tell the new US administration you want support for Taiwanese self-determination

2008-11-07T22:37:00.003-05:00

Via Tom Benson's blog, I found out about the incoming US administration's website, Change.gov. They've got forms for people to submit their hopes and vision for the new administration. The cynic in me suggests that this attempt at "open" government isn't really going to go anywhere, but the idealist in me wrote something to them, anyway. I expressed my hope that the US would be more supportive of the rights of the Taiwanese people for self-determination regarding their future. (This assumes that Taiwan remains a democracy...)

Add your stories and visions! (I don't want to be the only fool doing it... ;) )

Mixed feelings

2008-11-05T04:05:00.003-05:00

I don't know how to feel today. On the one hand, I'm happy about the results of the election in the US. On the other, I can't avoid getting the feeling that we're slowly sinking back into martial law here.

I'm going to copy a statement by international scholars and writers that Michael Turton posted since I'm pretty sure that the two or three people in the States who read my blog aren't the same as the (many more) people who read his. Hope the word can get out.

November 4, 2008

JOINT STATEMENT

US, European and Australian scholars and writers express concern about prosecutions in Taiwan

The undersigned, scholars and writers from the US, Europe and Australia wish to express their deep concern about the recent series of detentions in Taiwan of present and former DPP government officials. To date there have been at least seven such cases (See list below).

以下聯署的國際學者對於近日台灣政府一連串拘留卸任與現任民進黨政府官員的行動，深表憂慮。直至今日，據我們瞭解共有七件類似案件。

It is obvious that there have been cases of corruption in Taiwan, but these have occurred in both political camps. The political neutrality of the judicial system is an essential element in a democracy. It is also essential that any accused are considered innocent until proven guilty in the court of law.

很明顯的，貪污這個問題在台灣依然存在，但是這樣的案例在兩大政黨裡均曾發生。司法系統維持政治中立是民主的基本要素。堅持任何被指控者在裁定有罪前均是無罪的法律理念也是必要的。

We also believe that the procedures followed by the prosecutor's offices are severely flawed: while one or two of the accused have been formally charged, the majority is being held incommunicado without being charged. This is a severe contravention of the writ of habeas corpus and a basic violation of due process, justice and the rule of law.

我們認為檢察官所採取的法律程序有著嚴重的缺失：雖然當一、兩位被指控者已被正式起訴時，大多數被指控者卻在未被正式起訴情況之下就遭到收押禁見。這嚴重違反了人身保護令以及正當法律程序、公義與法治。

In the meantime, the prosecutor's offices evidently leak detrimental information to the press. This kind of "trial by press" is a violation of the basic standards of judicial procedures. It also gives the distinct impression that the Kuomintang authorities are using the judicial system to get even with members of the former DPP government. In addition, the people who are being held incommunicado are of course unable to defend themselves against the misreporting and the leaks in the news media.

在此同時，檢察官辦公室很明顯地將相關不利消息透露給媒體。這種「透過媒體辦案」的方式違反司法程序的基本標準；也讓外界認為國民黨政府利用司法系統來報復已下台的民進黨政府。此外，被收押禁見的人，在與外界斷絕聯繫的情況下，無法澄清外界不實報導與媒體洩密。

We do firmly believe that any alleged wrongdoings must be dealt with in a fair and open manner in an impartial court. Justice through the rule of law is essential to Taiwan's efforts to consolidate democracy and protect fundamental human rights.

我們深信任何宣稱的犯罪行為應該以公正與公開的方式，在中立的法庭裡審判。透過法治落實司法，才能強化台灣民主與保障基本人權。

We do not want to see Taiwan's hard-earned democracy jeopardized in this manner. Taiwan can justifiably be proud of its transition to democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would be sad for Taiwan and detrimental to its international image if the progress which was made during the past 20 years would be erased. Taiwan needs to move forward, not backwards to the unfair and unjust procedures as practiced during the dark days of Martial Law (1947-87).

我們不願見到台灣辛苦得來的民主陷入如此困境。台灣因為在八零年代後期與九零年早期成功轉型為民主國家，而引以為傲。如果過去二十年來的民主進展從此抺煞，這不僅將令人難過，台灣的國際形象也將受到嚴害傷害。台灣必須向前邁進，而不應是開倒車回到過去戒嚴黑暗時代的不公與不義。

Signed:

簽署人：

Nat Bellocchi, former Chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan 　
Julian Baum, former Taiwan Bureau Chief, Far Eastern Economic Review
Coen Blaauw, Formosan Association for Public Affairs, Washington DC
David Prager Branner, Director at Large (East Asia), American Oriental Society
Gordon G. Chang, author, "The Coming Collapse of China."
June Teufel Dreyer, Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, Florida
Edward Friedman, Professor of Political Science and East Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Bruce Jacobs, Professor of Asian Languages and Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Richard C. Kagan, Professor Emeritus of History, Hamline University, St. Paul Minnesota
Jerome F. Keating, Associate Professor, National Taipei University (Ret.). Author, "Island in the Stream, a quick case study of Taiwan's complex history" and other works on Taiwan
Daniel Lynch, Associate Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California
Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania
Donald Rodgers, Associate Professor of Political Science, Austin College, Texas
Terence Russell, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Manitoba
Scott Simon, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ottawa
John J. Tkacik Jr., Senior Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation, Washington DC
Gerrit van der Wees, Editor Taiwan Communiqué, Washington DC
Vincent Wei-cheng Wang, Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond, Virginia
Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania
Stephen Yates, President of DC Asia Advisory and former Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs
---------------------------------------------------------------

Specific cases of concern:
-- The arrest and detention on October 15th of former Interior minister Yu Cheng-hsien;

-- The arrest and detention on October 27th of former Hsinchu Science Park Director and Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection Dr. James Lee;

-- The arrest and detention on October 29th of DPP Chiayi County Commissioner Chen Ming-wen;

-- The indictment on October 30th of DPP Tainan City Councilor Wang Ting-yu;

-- The arrest and detention on October 31st of former National Security Council (NSC) secretary-general and Deputy Prime Minister Chiou I-jen;

-- The questioning of former Foreign Minister Dr. Mark Chen on November 3rd and insinuations in the press that he might be charged and arrested.

-- The arrest and detention on November 4th of DPP Yunlin County Magistrate Ms. Su Chih-fen.

Note: Ms. Su Chih-fen has refused to post bail and is currently on a hunger strike in protest of her detention. She has several health conditions already, including high blood pressure and liver problems. Here's an article about her arrest.

Three new Taiwan-related books in the former native speaker's library

2008-09-24T11:22:00.005-04:00

Been out-of-my-mind busy recently, but I bought these (or they've arrived) within this past week.

The first book is about the famous journal Free China Fortnightly that was started by Lei Chen and Hu Shih and shut down around the time Lei Chen was arrested in 1960. The book looks pretty tough, though--lots of political philosophy (and in Chinese, yet!). The author, He Zhuo'en, is actually from Hubei and teaches at Huazhong Normal University. We'll have to see how that fact colors his perspective (or my perspective on his book).

The third book was published in 1986 by FAPA and the Formosan Association for Human Rights.

Now if I can ever get any time to read any of them...

CFP: Local memories in a nationalizing and globalizing world (1750 up to present)

2008-09-09T04:13:00.002-04:00

via H-Memory:

CALL FOR PAPERS; LOCAL MEMORIES IN A NATIONALIZING AND GLOBALIZING WORLD (1750 UP TO PRESENT)

The Center for Political History, the Center for Urban History (University of Antwerp) and
FelixArchief (Antwerp City Archives) are organizing a conference on:
LOCAL MEMORIES IN A NATIONALIZING AND GLOBALIZING WORLD (1750 UP TO PRESENT)

Place: FelixArchief, Oudeleeuwenrui 29, 2000 Antwerp
Date: 15th-16th October 2009

In academic discourse, the concept of 'collective memory' has migrated, since the 1950s from the field of the social to that of the cultural sciences. Maurice Halbwachs' intuition that collective memory was essentially a pre-existing social fact structuring individual past-relationships, gave way to the recognition that social memories are more or less intentionally construed with the aim of creating and consolidating identities. It was in this constructivist vein that the concept became successful among historians, thoroughly influenced by the cultural turn. Their focus was on the way memories were forged through stories, monuments and other cultural artifacts, that came to serve as lieux de mémoire within specific collectivities. Among these collectivities, nations have received the lion's share of the historians' attention. In spite of a recent re-orientation to the memories of other - most often smaller - 'milieux de mémoire', the central premise has remained that intellectual and political elites deliberately produced memories, which were consumed by the masses. Even when it is admitted that 'consumption' can consist of active and creative appropriation, the overall top-down perspective seems to be largely unquestioned.

This conference opts for a more dynamic view of the creation and transmission of memories. It focuses on the ways in which memories were recurred to and used in the everyday discourses and practices of groups at a local level. These groups can be defined along different lines (socio-professional, geographic, generational, religious, ethnic, ...) and have various extensions (a neighborhood, a village, a town, a region); moreover, the discourses and practices can bear upon the most diverse aspects of life and take on the most diverse forms (textual, oral, visual, material). Not the straightforward creation of master narratives about the group's own past will be the main concern of the conference, but the way in which these groups more or less consciously - and more or less successfully - combined diverse, sometimes even conflicting memories. Doing so, the organizers hope fully to re-inscribe the concept of memory into the field of social history. The period that will be investigated - from 1750 until today - is characterized by the rise and the expansion of the nation state, and by the competing process of globalization. The efforts that were made during this period to create homogeneous national memories will serve during this conference as a background to the study of local memories. Did these local memories resist the growing prominence of national memory, did they incorporate aspects of it, or did they exist and develop without any interference of 'the national'? And how did local memories interact with globalizing processes
such as colonization and migration?

Within this general framework, papers should address one of the following themes:
- The deliberate creation of institutions for the preservation and transmission of local memories (local museums, associations, courses in primary schools on local history, citizen initiatives,...).
- Local forms of historiography, without or within the academic sphere.
- The presence of the past in ritualized forms of community building at a local or regional level (celebrations, liturgies, monuments,...).
- The presence of the past in non-ritualized, group-specific practices and discourses (the transmission of professional skills, name-giving, ...).
- The recurrence to the past in conflicts between groups or in acts of local resistance.
- The transmission (and alteration) of traditions as a way of preserving group-specific memories in changing contexts.
- The experience of the local past by individuals, through the study of ordinary writings, oral sources or their material heritage.

Organizing committee:
Marnix Beyen (Center for Political History - Univ. of Antwerp )
Bert De Munck (Center for Urban History - Univ. of Antwerp)
Brecht Deseure (Center for Urban History - Univ. of Antwerp)
Inge Schoups (FelixArchief, Antwerp City Archives)
Carolien Van Loon (Center for Political History - Univ. of Antwerp)
Tom Verschaffel (KULeuven - Subfaculty of Arts Campus Kortrijk)

Contact:
Tel. : ++ 32 (0)3 220 42 68
Email: local.memories@ua.ac.be
Website: www.ua.ac.be/localmemories

PLEASE SEND YOUR ABSTRACT (OF ABOUT 500 WORDS TO local.memories@ua.ac.be BEFORE 1ST NOVEMBER 2008

New book in the former native speaker's library

2008-08-05T04:16:00.008-04:00

Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895-1945, by George H. Kerr (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1974)
Good condition, but no dust cover; title page autographed by George H. Kerr; inscription on inside front cover: "For Bill Kerr the 2nd, from Jack Kerr, the 1st, Honolulu, November 16, 1974" ("Jack" is most likely George Kerr, since Jack was his nickname [click on the image of the letter].* But who's Bill Kerr the 2nd?)

*Or check out these letters to Jack Kerr, written in 1947...

Our new pet?

2008-07-18T07:13:00.007-04:00

This critter has decided to move in with us recently. What shall we call it?

(Click on the picture for a larger version... if you dare...)

In fact, what is it? I mean, I know it's a spider, but...

It doesn't seem to do much but wander around, yawning and stretching...

and occasionally picking its nose...

Seems to have taken a shine to us, though. Maybe it's the reincarnation of Mei-Mei.

The spammers are getting more creative

2008-07-17T10:22:00.006-04:00

Here are the subject lines of ~~three~~ ~~four~~ lots of e-mails I just received:

"Stray javelin kills promising US sprinter"

"Russia launches nuclear plant"

"Charred bodies found on White House lawn"

"Freak accident causes Tom cruise to be paralysed"

"Two-headed baby born in Texas"

"Michael Vick escapes from Federal jail" (this one might need a footnote)

"Madonnas Former Home Destroyed By Jesus"

More as I get them... maybe it could be a found poem.

2008-07-03T07:17:00.002-04:00

(Pardon me for a moment while I put my fist through this computer monitor...)

[Update: There. That felt better.]

CFP: Matters of State, Leuven University, Belgium

2008-06-29T03:33:00.001-04:00

Call for Papers

Matters of State: Bildung and Literary-Intellectual Discourse in the Nineteenth Century

Leuven University, April 23-25 2009

The American and French Revolutions are generally considered as decisive episodes in the emergence of what we have come to know as modern democracy. Their displacement of time-honored models of hereditary rule and of monotheistic conceptions of sovereignty inaugurated Western modernity. The fall-out of these ruptures made the 19th century an era of unprecedented intensity in the history of politics and the political. As a time of massive demographic change, new patterns of production and distribution, seismic surges in geopoliticization, and relentless social differentiation and specialization, the 19th century became a ‘condition’ demanding to be addressed. This challenge was met by a multiplicity of discourses, few of which can be decisively told apart: poetry, political economy, cultural criticism, historiography, philosophy, and science in their different ways all attempted to measure the impact of the displacements that defined their modernity and to shape an adequate response to them.

It is from this context that nineteenth-century discourses of the State derive their urgency. As strategies to imagine – and to actively pursue – forms of collectivity that can serve as a concerted response to the challenges of modernity, these discourses enlist (or reject) categories such as the nation, education, or the imagination in order to formulate a new rhetoric of community. What distinguishes the discourse on the State is its express ambition to contribute to an appropriate response to the modern condition by training its audience to become responsible citizens of the State. This typically involves the adaptation of models for the cultivation of the modern self, such as those inherited from the German discourse on Bildung, to contexts of increased scale and complexity that challenge these models to the core. Not only in Britain or Germany, but in every locality where the task of articulating the nation with the State is recognized as a discursive challenge, literary-intellectual discourse becomes an archive where many of the tensions and contradictions of the nineteenth century intersect in a particularly condensed way.

Because the imagination of the State, as a political and social unit, relies on rhetorical, tropological, and imagistic processes, disciplines that explicitly focus on textual and imagistic strategies are crucial in the analysis of the politics of the State. ‘Matters of State’ proposes to revisit significant instances of the literary-intellectual attempt to re-think the State, and relevant intersections of these attempts with related and/or competing political, literary, scientific, (crypto-)religious, iconographic, … discursive strategies to imagine the State. We are interested in papers that focus on explicit or implicit contributions to a public aesthetics of the State by way of new or modified rhetorics of community.

Possible topics include but are not restricted to the following:

What are the means of production, cultivation, preservation and reproduction of “moral sentiments” appropriate to an ethos of the State?
How do affective dispositions like sympathy and trust travel from the intimate sphere of personal encounter to the public sphere of citizenship?
Given the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment reassessment of the impact of religion on the individual, what are the discursive formations that take over, at least in part, the public administration of emotional investment traditionally monitored by religious institutions?
How do available or emergent routines of identity formation in terms of class, gender or race relate to models of citizenship?
How do concepts such as “region,” “country,” “nation,” and “Empire” find a place in a rhetoric of community centering on the State?
What are the effects of the interaction of organic metaphors and an increasingly industrialized nineteenth-century reality?
In what way do present-day discourses on governmentality, biopower, and sovereignty allow us to reflect on nineteenth-century conceptualizations of the State?
How do discursive constructions of the State differ in different countries, both in Europe and abroad?
To what extent do literary-intellectual discourses exploit not only the educational but also the imagistic denotation of the term Bildung?
How do constructions of the State construct the State’s other?
How did poetry, and literature more generally, operate as a privileged space for the embodiment, testing, and subversion of models of the State?
To what extent do imaginings of citizenship, equality, fraternity … inevitably entail the persistence, or even the promotion, of economic, ethnic, and/or gender inequalities? How do inclusive models (fail to) account for their exclusions?
How do scientific models taken from mathematics and the natural sciences influence discourse on community and citizen formation, and to what extent are these models (biological, psychological, sociological, anthropological, economic, …) accommodated in a prospective science of State or Staatswissenschaft?
How do nations and individuals come to terms with modernity as a growing dependence on the specialized, expert discourses of science and technology, and how are these ideas of dependence and expertise themselves constructed rhetorically?
Keynote speakers:

Amanda Anderson (Johns Hopkins University)
Karl Heinz Bohrer (Stanford University)
Eva Geulen (Universität Bonn)
Thomas Pfau (Duke University)
Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario)
Joseph Vogl (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, to be confirmed)

We welcome proposals for panels and for 20-minutes papers in English, French, or German. Please send your one-page proposal (two pages for panels), together with your contact data, in a separate word document to matters.of.state [at] arts.kuleuven.be, before September 30. For panel proposals, provide a general introduction and short abstracts for the different papers (3 or 4). Notification of acceptance no later than November 15. For more information, check www.arts.kuleuven.be/matters_of_state. The conference website will be updated regularly as more information becomes available.

Some changes in the works regarding (some) foreign scholars?

2008-06-26T09:54:00.004-04:00

The former native Chinese speaker pointed out this article to me in the China Times that mentions a few interesting things about work permits and visas for foreign scholars. Some of them are a bit confusing (to me, anyway), so I want to write this out to see if I'm clear about it.

The article mentions that Taiwan University was having trouble getting a work permit for a foreign Nobel scholar they wanted to bring in to lecture, so legislator Ding Shouzhong is pushing for some changes to the Employment Services Act (就業服務法) to allow foreign scholars in to do research or teaching for up to six months, pending approval of the MOE. In other words, they wouldn't need to go through the process of getting a work permit through the Council of Labor Affairs, a process which includes getting blood tests for HIV and venereal diseases. (There's an interesting racial/class issue in this whole thing, by the way--particularly in this article, that suggests that it's too embarrassing to ask famous foreign scholars to submit to the kind of process required of foreign laborers.)

There's more to say about this article, but I don't have time to work through it right now. (Got other things to do.) Anyway, below is a copy of the article in Chinese:

台大去年有意聘請諾貝爾得主崔琦來台講學，卻因需申請工作證而受阻。立委丁守中昨天在立法院衛環委員會提案，並通過修正《就業服務法》第四十八條，增列經教育部認可，即可來台進行六個月內短期講座、學術研究，不受限是否有工作證。
對此修法，學界一片叫好。台大主秘傅立成大表贊同，他說，延聘海外知名學者是追求國際化的重要環節，禮遇有益促進學術交流，是相當進步的政策。半年免工作，即表示可一整個學期待在台灣，都免辦工作證，對學界相當方便。

陽明大學校長吳妍華表示，之前找國外學者來台，得經過體檢是否有愛滋病、傳染病。但大學實在開不了口要求海外大師配合抽血檢驗。現在都免了，邀請更方便。

成大校長賴明詔說，以前的方式對學者太不尊重，像是「外勞」，要花二、三個月向勞工局申請，對校方是沈重的負擔。

我國《就業服務法》第四十八條明白規定，「各級政府及其所屬學術研究機構聘請擔任顧問、研究工作者，或與中華民國國民結婚並獲准居留者，不需申請許可」。去年傳出台大聘請諾貝爾得主崔琦來台講學卻需申請工作證，引發爭議。

勞委會主委王如玄指出，教育部蒐集十四個國家對大專院校聘僱國際知名人士規定，僅四個國家簡化行政流程和文件，但所有國家都要求入境工作就需申請許可，沒有優惠待遇。勞委會需顧及本國人工作權益，不宜對外國學者來台從事學術研究工作全面免申請許可。

經勞委會、教育部和丁守中等立委協商後，增列進行六個月內短期講座、學術研究者，經教育部認可，可免申請許可。全案送院會審查。

Comp/Oral I debate contest

2008-06-19T07:04:00.008-04:00

I just finished judging a debate contest in which students from the Composition and Oral Practice I classes at Tunghai (first-year English majors) debated the resolution, "Mainland Chinese students should be allowed to apply to universities in Taiwan." We listened to three debates on this topic today.

I have to say I value the opportunity to hear what first-year students have to say about this issue. They brought up some interesting points, illustrating, perhaps, some of their own anxieties about education in Taiwan. They evidently frequently hear about how hardworking students in China are--several groups mentioned stories about Chinese students studying under streetlights when the dorm lights go out, for instance, and compared these stories with examples of university students in Taiwan who play computer games and chat on MSN all night long. (Evidently Mr. Ma has mentioned this at some point in his argument in favor of allowing Chinese students here.) In the end, I found my own point of view about this issue complicated a bit by what they said.

I found, not surprisingly, things to criticize about the students' debates, but also things to praise, like the way many of them arranged their arguments, rebutted opponents' arguments, and cited sources. One thing I forgot to say, that I wish I had the opportunity to say to them, is that we teachers sometimes forget that what we ask students to do is something that has taken us years to be able to achieve. (This is true at least in my case. I'm still terrible at impromptu speaking!) So my hat's off to the students and teachers of Comp/Oral I this year!

--------
Michael Turton asked about the arguments students were making in the debates, so I thought I'd mention some of them here. I'm just listing some out here without comment. Also, some arguments might overlap.

For allowing Chinese students to apply:

Will stimulate/promote cultural exchange between Chinese and Taiwanese students
Will promote cultural understanding between Chinese and Taiwanese society
Can give students from the PRC a chance to live and learn in a more open society
Will help promote colleges in Taiwan that have declining enrollments
Will help internationalize education in Taiwan by encouraging foreign students to apply
If we accept students from other countries, why not accept students from China?
Will help motivate Taiwanese students to work harder (the Mr. Ma argument)
Will bring more elite students here from China

Those were most of the more frequently cited "pro" arguments the students made. As Sam Spade says, "Maybe some of them are unimportant - I won't argue about that - but look at the number of them. And what have we got on the other side?" Well, let's take a look:

For not allowing Chinese students to apply:

Will require Taiwan to provide Chinese students with scholarships, causing a further drain on the educational budget
Schools with declining enrollments are not high quality, so should be allowed to close
Students coming to Taiwan from China might not be all that elite (especially if they're sent to low-ranked schools)
Will result in a lot of illegal labor from China (workers pretending to be students)
Could result in legal problems concerning whether students from China are to be considered "international" or "domestic"

There was some interesting back-and-forth related to a lot of these assertions, including citations (on both sides) of examples from other countries like the U.S. and Belgium. A lot of discussion centered around who was going to have to pay for their attendance in Taiwan's universities and why we should or should not (or even can) prop up schools with declining enrollments by 'importing' students from China. There was some grudging acceptance of the idea that bringing students over could contribute to cultural exchange and understanding, but the "cons" rejected the idea that bringing in students from China would encourage more international students to come.

One thing I wanted to hear that I didn't hear until the very end was a number: how many Chinese students are we talking about? No one had a clear number for how many might be accepted to Taiwan, but one "pro" debater mentioned that in Hong Kong, only 205 of the 2000 Chinese students who applied in 2005 were accepted. This eased my mind a bit--some of the "con" debaters' arguments made me think that perhaps we were talking about allowing millions of students in. (One person on the "con" side expressed concern about traffic problems that might be caused by an influx of Chinese students!)

[Update, 23 June 2008]

More pictures taken on Sunday

2008-06-17T04:45:00.003-04:00

Here are some pictures we took of the Central Mountain Range on Sunday. They were taken from the fifth floor of the Humanities building at Tunghai. We had a good view of the mountains after the rain cleaned up the air.

The construction on the left is of "Moon River," a new apartment building (like we need any more around here...)

The tall tower is a building called, simply, "Hotel ONE".

The following two are "stitched" shots...

Trip to the Daodong Tutorial Academy

2008-06-16T06:32:00.008-04:00

The weather cleared up a bit yesterday, so the former native Chinese speaker and I took a trip to Hemei in Changhua to look at the Daodong Tutorial Academy there. We went to the Huangsi Academy in Taichung County a while back and thought it would be interesting to see another of the traditional schools set up here.

The visitor's guide to the Academy describes it as follows:

Local gentlemen advocated and offered a land for building the Daodong Tutorial Academy in 1857, and it was completed the following year. It is a compound with traditional Chinese houses around a courtyard which sits north, and faces south.

Here are some of the pictures we took of the Academy. Most of these were taken by the former native Chinese speaker.

The main gate

The front of the school

Some lianwu (wax apples) growing on a tree said to be over 100 years old

The entrance to the school building--the guide told us that the center door was reserved for officials, elites, or other grand high muck-a-mucks. If you look at the picture of the front of the school, you'll see the two side doors have steps leading up to them, but the center door has a ramp. That wasn't for wheelchair access; it was for carrying someone up in a palanquin (轎子).

A newer painting, dating from 2004. This painting is found near the front door of the building.

An older painting, dating from 1884. I have to admit I like the older ones better than the newer ones, but a lot of the school had to be rebuilt after years of disuse. The most recent major work done on it was after the 921 earthquake in 1999.

Prayers from area students who want to get into particular schools (the local 'deity' is Zhu Xi, the "father" of Neoconfucianism)

This is interesting--they used this to burn paper that had been written on, as a way to honor Cang Jie, who, as legend has it, is responsible for the Chinese writing system. Since Chinese characters are, I guess, sacred, people were not allowed to throw away paper that had been written on.

I've got more pictures of the school here, in case anyone is interested. We had a nice time, and a staff member named Miss Tung was especially helpful in answering our questions. Here's a pic of her and me:

(Next time I'll shave before going out with a camera. You never know...)

[Updated 17 June 2008]

End-of-the-school-year activities

2008-06-13T12:47:00.006-04:00

I've been getting my picture taken a lot lately, not because of my killer good looks ~~(though I'm sure that's one reason)~~, but because my Freshman English students took me out for dinner this week. In return for their feeding me, I stared into the lenses of their many cameras and gave the "Y" finger gesture (known as the "V" for "victory" in the US) many times. Here's some of the evidence.

I had a great time with my students this year and will miss them. They're like the children I don't have (and, hence, whose tuition I don't have to pay). Seriously, though, it has been especially poignant for me this semester because two of my students, a current student from International Trade and (her boyfriend) a former student from Public Management, were in a serious traffic accident in April and have both been in the hospital since then. Sometimes I feel like the world is such a dangerous place...

This afternoon we also went to a going-away party for two teachers who are retiring, Olivia Chang and Paul Harwood. Olivia and Paul (and Jan, too!), we'll miss you and wish you the best!

Dragon Boat deliciosities

2008-06-08T11:50:00.004-04:00

Mmmm.... good... Nothing like homemade zongzi...

What philosophy do I follow?

2008-06-08T01:48:00.002-04:00

I'm evidently quite confused...

What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Utilitarianism

Your life is guided by the principles of Utilitarianism: You seek the greatest good for the greatest number.

“The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”

--Jeremy Bentham

“Whenever the general disposition of the people is such, that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things, good government is impossible.”

--John Stuart Mill

More info at Arocoun's Wikipedia User Page...

Utilitarianism

60%

Justice (Fairness)

55%

Hedonism

55%

Strong Egoism

50%

Kantianism

50%

Existentialism

45%

Nihilism

45%

Apathy

35%

Divine Command

35%

CFP: Tamkang International Conference on Second Language Writing: Issues and Concerns

2008-06-03T11:06:00.002-04:00

Tamkang International Conference on Second Language Writing: Issues and Concerns

Call for Abstracts:
Writing as one of the fundamental language skills has traditionally posed a variety of challenges for second language teachers and learners. Once the writing skill is placed within particular contexts, these challenges multiply. These range from addressing writing skills within exam-driven traditional curricula to navigating the proliferation of technologies, to creating meaningful contexts for the learning of writing and managing the workload created for teachers when students write and expect feedback. This conference is intended as a forum for addressing the full range of pedagogical and research issues on second language writing. Abstracts are invited for papers on any aspects of foreign or second language writing learning and pedagogy. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Cognitive perspectives in L2 writing
Learning Strategies
Critical Literacy
Identity in Literacy Instruction
L2 writing pedagogy
Reading/writing connection
CMC in literacy instruction
Academic writing
Foreign language writing within school curricula
Writing instruction integrating other language skills
Second language writing integrated with other content areas (content-based instruction and writing across the curriculum, for example)
Emerging literacies and issues of register (including technology-enabled influences on literacies and register exerted by the proliferation of e-mail, mobile devices and messaging, and the rise of the blog)
Issues of feedback on student writing
Research issues in writing pedagogy
Voice and issues of empowerment
Writing within standardized/institutional exam systems: (TOEFL, GEPT, etc.)
Writing and technology
The composing process

Important Dates:
Abstracts due: July 20th, 2008
Acceptance Notification: August 20th, 2008
Camera-ready papers due: November. 30th, 2008
Conference dates: December 5-6, 2008

Submit abstracts via email to: Wendy, miracle [at] mail.tku.edu.tw

Or mail to:
English Department, Tamkang University,
151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, Taipei County Taiwan 25137, R.O.C.
Tel : 886-26215656 ext. 2344

Abstracts should not exceed 350 words in length (including references) and should include a clear description of the issue(s) addressed and a sketch of results. Include the author’s name, affiliation, and postal and email addresses.

Naming Taiwan's ruling party

2008-05-30T05:16:00.002-04:00

Just something I noticed--don't know if anyone else did: during his visit to China, Wu Po-hsiung used the full name of the KMT: 中國國民黨 (Chinese [or "China"] Nationalist Party) a lot. Every time I saw a clip of him talking, "中國國民黨" (rather than simply "國民黨") would come out of his mouth. I suppose part of the reason for this would be that his immediate audience, the CCP officials he was meeting with, would appreciate Wu's embrace of the 中國 in the name of the island's ruling party after the years of "去中國化" that we were supposedly experiencing here and that probably had the CCP folks there wringing their hands (along with the KMT folks here).

It's interesting, though, to think about Wu's embrace of "中國國民黨" in light of the attempts to "localize" the KMT during the election--Ma's "long stays" and frequent use of Taiwanese, and the de-emphasis on the "中國" part of the party's name (though not to the point of changing its official name). The other interesting thing to think about will be what the KMT will call itself locally from here on out--will "中國" be used more, say, on local election posters, banners, etc.?

Naming Taiwan's leader

2008-05-28T21:29:00.003-04:00

The Foreigner in Formosa comments on the KMT Chairman Wu Po-hsiung's use of "Mr. Ma" (instead of "President Ma") during his time in China.

Question for the KMT: If YOU feel no particular need to call Ma Ying-jeou, "President," why should any of his political opponents back home feel obligated to do so?

I personally have decided just to refer to him as 馬特首--might as well get used to the sound of it...

CFP: Rhetorical Citizenship conference in Denmark

2008-05-07T21:11:00.001-04:00

via

Call for Papers - Call for Participation International Conference on

"Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation"

October 9-10, 2008
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, DENMARK

The conference is presented by the researchers' network "Rhetorical Citizenship: Perspectives on Deliberative Democracy", based at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. The conference will open at 9:00 AM on October 9 and close at 5:00 PM on October 10. The registration desk is open from 8:30 am. both days. Participants may sign in, pick up conference materials, etc. at this time.

The conference theme frames explorations into:

how rhetorical citizenship can manifest itself
what common and/or local traits it might have
what societal interests are vested in regarding citizenship as a rhetorical phenomenon.

The conference welcomes scholars from a broad spectrum of academic fields, including Communication, Rhetoric, Political Science, and Philosophy, as well as educators, journalists, politicians, activists in political and grassroots movements, etc.

Keynote Speakers
The following Keynote Speakers will be featured:

Professor John Dryzek:
REPRESENTING DISCOURSES
Contemporary democracy is mostly representative democracy. Deliberative democracy highlights communication rather than aggregation of the preferences of individuals. Especially in contexts where a well-defined demos cannot be identified, it may make sense to think in terms of the representation of discourses rather than persons. We might then think about desirable characteristics of discursive representatives, and the circumstances under which they might meet in a 'chamber of discourses'.

Professor John Dryzek (Australian National University) is the author of Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science, Democracy in Capitalist Times: Ideals, Limits, and Struggles, The Politics of the Earth, and several other works.

Professor Rosa A. Eberly:
"QUANTUM PARLIAMENTS": DISCIPLINARITY, PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP, AND COMMON GOODS

More than two millennia after Plato put the -ic in rhetoric -- and more than a century after hair-splitting disciplinarity began to erode the scholarly pursuit of common questions -- scholars from across the arts and sciences (even physicists!) are bringing their "occupational psychoses" to the shared and perduring problems of democracy. What might scholars do to imagine our different roles -- researchers, teachers, citizens -- as complementary rather than antagonistic? I will discuss with the audience several historical and contemporary cases of how disciplinary differences discouraged and enabled the useful pursuit of common questions in the context of public scholarship.

Professor Rosa A. Eberly (Penn State University, formerly University of Texas, Austin) is a Fellow of Penn State's Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy and is author of Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres, The Elements of Reasoning and many studies on rhetoric and civic engagement, and public scholarship and has published in distinguished journals such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs and Rhetoric Review, and New Directions for Teaching and Learning.

Professor John M. Murphy:
CULTIVATING CITIZENSHIP: THE ROLE OF PUBLIC RHETORIC In recent years, a variety of thinkers, from Robert Putnam to Danielle Allen, have identified individualism and distrust as key obstacles to a vigorous practice of citizenship. They have also generally focused on public rhetoric as a problem and unfavorably compared the competitive norms implicit within political discourse to the cooperative norms they see in other discursive practices. Rather than giving up on public rhetoric, I suggest we explore some exemplary discursive practices that may light the way toward a more vibrant citizenry. I'll illustrate these concepts with examples drawn from John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.

Professor John M. Murphy (University of Illinois, formerly University of Georgia) is the author of numerous studies of American political rhetoric in leading journals such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Professor Georgia Warnke: Title to be announced.
Professor Warnke (University of California, Riverside) is the author of Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason, Justice and Interpretation, Legitimate Differences: Interpretation in the Abortion Controversy and Other Public Debates, and After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender.

Participation and papers
All those interested in the conference themes are invited, whether they wish to present papers or not. Papers discussing aspects of rhetorical citizenship - particularly with regard to questions raised by ideals about democratic debate and its many manifestations - are invited. Topics may include practical, ideological and ethical perspectives on public discourse. Particular questions explored might be:

What should we expect from public debate?
Can meaningful norms of public conversation be formulated, and how might such norms be nurtured?
What is "reasonable disagreement" and how can it be handled constructively?
How might the notion "rhetorical agency" contribute to our thinking about and critique of public deliberation?
What characterizes a constructive speaking position and how might it be obtained?

Papers should be given in English. Time slots for papers will be 45 minutes, including at least 10 minutes for questions and debate.

If you wish to participate, send an email to Rhetoricalcitizenship@hum.ku.dk by June 1, 2008. (You may use the reply email function if applicable.) Those wishing to present papers should include a title and an abstract of no more than 200 words. Within a short time, you will then receive an email giving further information on registration, payment, etc., and directing you to the conference website.

Notification on acceptance of papers will be sent out by email by June 15, 2008.

Registration and fees:
Registration must be sent by email to Rhetoricalcitizenship@hum.ku.dk
Fees for registration before July 1, 2008:
For academic faculty: DDK 500,00
For students and non-academic participants: DDK 350,00

Fees for registration later than July 1, 2008:
For academic faculty: DDK 600,00
For students and non-academic participants: DDK 450,00

Fees include conference participation, lunches, and coffee/tea/refreshments during conference hours, and a conference dinner (excl. beverages).

Instructions regarding payment will be posted on the conference website as soon as possible and sent by email to individuals who have submitted an abstract.

Final registration deadline will be September 15, 2008.

Conference Publication
The organizers intend to publish a volume containing selected conference papers. Participants interested in submitting their paper for consideration are invited to indicate this during the conference by submitting a brief statement containing subject, title and contact information. Final versions of papers must be submitted by November 15, 2008. All submissions for the conference volume will be peer reviewed.

Conference Website
There will be a conference website continually updated with relevant information, such as a full conference schedule, advice on travel, lodging, meals, etc. A website for the conference is under construction and will shortly be accessible at this address: http://rhetoricalcitizenship.mef.ku.dk/conference

As organizers of the conference, we sincerely hope that you will choose to attend.

With our best wishes,

The Conference Committee:

Lisa Storm Villadsen Christian Kock
Associate Professor of Rhetoric Professor of Rhetoric
University of Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen

Hans V. Hansen Ove Korsgaard
Professor of Philosophy Professor, The Danish University School of Education
University of Windsor, Canada University of Aarhus

Kjell Lars Berge
Professor, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies
University of Oslo

Kasper Møller Hansen
Associate Professor of General and Comparative Political Science Dept. of Political Science
University of Copenhagen

The Rev. B.F. Tefft on Daniel Webster's oratory

2008-05-05T05:26:00.003-04:00

While working on a syllabus for an MOE-required elective called "Introduction to English Rhetoric" (that may not ever actually be taught, since although we're required to offer it students aren't required to take it), I came across the following comments on Daniel Webster's oratory in the preface to a book of Webster's selected speeches. (I imagine the previous sentence will have some of my readers--if I have any readers--wondering why anyone would ask me to write a syllabus for a course on rhetoric, but anyway...)

Here it is for my future reference:

It is quite evident that Mr. Webster matured rather slowly; that his efforts made before the age of fifty were his most popular because the most impassioned efforts; but that his productions dated beyond the age of fifty, though less fiery, are generally more indicative of his unsurpassed abilities as a man of deep, penetrating, far-reaching, and comprehensive mind. His mind, indeed, seemed to grow clearer as he advanced in years; and the very latest speeches, though not so striking to superficial hearers, will be regarded hereafter, by close and competent readers, as the most finished of all the productions of his tongue and pen.

One result, it is to be earnestly hoped, will not fail to follow a general circulation of these master-pieces among the generous youth of Mr. Webster's native land. It is to be hoped that his style of elocution, calm, slow dignified, natural, unambitious, and yet direct and powerful, will take the place of that showy, flowery, flashy, fitful and boisterous sort of speaking, which seems to be becoming too common, which so breaks down the health of the speaker, and which is nevertheless most likely to strike the feelings and corrupt the judgment of the young. Let me here say plainly, that, having heard Mr. Webster speak very frequently, on almost every variety of occasion, I have never heard him, even when most excited, raise his voice higher, or sink it lower, or utter his words more rapidly than he could do consistently with the most perfect ease, and with the utmost dignity of movement. He never played the orator. He never seemed to be making any effort. What he had to say he said as easily, as naturally, and yet as forcibly and possible, with such a voice as he used in common conversation, only elevated and strengthened to meet the demands of his large audiences. So intent did he seem to be, so intent he certainly was, in making his hearers see and feel as he did, in relation to the subject of the hour, that no one thought of his manner, or whether he had any manner, till the speech was over. That is oratory, true oratory; and it is to be hoped that the more general distribution of these masterpieces will have the ultimate effect of making it the American standard of oratory from this age to all future ages. (5-6)

From the Preface to Speeches of Daniel Webster, Selected by Rev. B. F. Tefft, D.D., LL.D., Embracing His Acknowledged Masterpieces in Each Department of the Great Field of Intellectual Action. NY: A. L. Burt Company, n.d. (1852?)

Description of Marjorie Bly from 1959

2008-04-24T07:12:00.000-04:00

Earlier I mentioned a letter I had read that included a description of Marjorie Bly. Judy Manwell (Moore), an Oberlin "rep" to Taiwan in the late 1950s, had the opportunity to meet Marjorie Bly during a trip to Penghu in 1959. Judy wrote a letter to the Oberlin community on January 30, 1959 about her trip. She has given me permission to post the part of a letter about her visit with Bly:

Marjorie Bly: A name, it seemed to be last year, which went well among Protestant pioneers and saints--rhythmical, forthright, pronounceable. Many times in Taiwan and even in Hong Kong I had heard the name and how its owner, an American nurse, had dedicated herself to helping the lepers out there on the lonely little Pescadores [Penghu]--"and how she can stand it I don't know...really admirable!" It happened that while we were sitting in the little airlines office poring over their map and thinking how we might get hold of her, our Saint walked in to ask the genial airlines fellow if his kids were still coming over for checkers that night. About 35, she had chosen those classic clothes missionaries buy to stay in style for five years with more verve than most; she was too femininely plump for the traditional Saint, her gaze too direct and unclogged with surplus love of humanity for the modern Peale Saint. She took us to the General Hospital, explaining that it was her goal to incorporate treatment of lepers with that of the other sick people. She had come out six years before with a few glowing letters from Pescadores patients treated by her in a Taipei leprosarium, which made her welcome in their families and talked about in others. Her visits to to other homes, however, had at first brought terror that the dread disease lurked there. Gradually they saw that in most homes she found no leprosy; where she did find it she could relieve the age-old horror. They began to bring their symptoms into the little laboratory marked "dermatology." Here a fat solemn-looking Taiwanese nurse works Miss Bly's struggling Chinese into the patients' language. After a few minutes' chatting she got us off on an excursion to another island and went back to work. Several hours later we staggered off a grimy little boat. It had been a rough trip, especially because everybody crowded to one side to avoid spray, putting us, if no one else, in constant fear of capsizing. With soggy but dogged conscientiousness, we had huddled alone on the spray-beaten side. We were weary of living, though glad to be alive. And there was Marjorie to take us to a cup of coffee. There had been no cozy cordial invitation before we left--there was just this moment of bliss on returning. We sat for a long time in her bare shop-like room which she loved for its privacy, and we drank hoarded coffee and ate the little bean cakes which are the eternal reward for making friends in China and the eternal acid--or sickenly sweet--test of one's inter-cultural adapt[a]bility. We talked about her Christmas tree of green paper on white artfully festooned with Christmas-card cut-outs ("I made that for the hospital a couple years ago. I got disgusted with this place. No Christmas. I brought back that white cellophane one you saw in the lab from a dime store in the States.") Thinking of her brave efficient single-handed Christmas, somebody asked, "Are there many other Westerners around?" "Twenty or thirty military advisers." "See much of them?" "They very kindly included me in their Thanksgiving dinner." We talked about America--"I was a case for Freud this last furlough at home. I went around speaking and speaking and no one could ever understand me. I was so glad to come back...here they never thought I would return. I guess I really surprised them. I'm glad they know somebody really cares enough about this little place."

Thanks again to Judy Manwell Moore for allowing me to quote from her letter!

Marjorie Bly of Penghu passes away

2008-04-10T00:54:00.002-04:00

A while back, I posted about Marjorie Bly, a nurse who treated lepers in Penghu for over 50 years. I heard the other day from her cousin that she has passed away.

Here's an article in the Taipei Times about her passing:

Aunty White dies at 89

Marjorie Bly, a nurse from the US who treated lepers on Penghu for 54 years, died on Tuesday of heart failure. She was 89. Bly's heart failure was the result of pneumonia brought on by a bout of flu, said her doctor, Wu Fang-tsan (吳芳燦). Paying his last respects to Bly at the hospital, Penghu County Commissioner Wang Chien-fa (王乾發) described Bly as "Penghu's angel" and said her death would bring sorrow to many, adding that the county government would issue a public statement recognizing her long-term devotion to the island. Wu Wen-chung (吳文忠), a local priest, said local residents would follow Bly's instructions and decorate her funeral ceremony with her sunflowers. Wu said the funeral would be simple, with little talk and hymns. Bly herself requested this, Wu said, because "she did not pass away. She is just sleeping." Bly, nicknamed "Aunty White," by local residents, was assigned to Taiwan by her church in 1952. She arrived in Penghu two years after that. Last April, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) bestowed a state medal upon Bly in recognition of her contributions and sacrifices for the people of Penghu.

男人的 what??

2008-04-06T07:24:00.005-04:00

After eating lunch at 客家本色 this afternoon, we went to pay the bill and noticed that the restaurant was playing music from Luo Shifeng's latest album. I wasn't sure that I was reading the title of his album correctly, so I asked the former native Chinese speaker, who "read" loudly, "男人的 LP." It took us both a minute to realize that the title is supposed to read, "男人的汗" and then we had a good laugh at our own expense. In our defense, though, don't you think the last character in the title could be easily mistaken for LP?*

*On the meaning of "LP", see here.

Videos of The Mike Wallace Interview

2008-04-05T08:05:00.003-04:00

(via)

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has put episodes of The Mike Wallace Interview from 1957-8 on their website. There are video files of most of the episodes and transcripts of all of them.

As the website says,

Mike Wallace rose to prominence in 1956 with the New York City television interview program, Night-Beat, which soon developed into the nationally televised prime-time program, The Mike Wallace Interview. Well prepared with extensive research, Wallace asked probing questions of guests framed in tight close-ups. The result was a series of compelling and revealing interviews with some of the most interesting and important people of the day.

2008-03-29T10:52:00.002-04:00

Alex Reid over at digital digs describes a writing assignment his daughter is given:

Today's 3rd grade in-class writing assignment: why I love America. Of course one must be sure to follow the format. I love America. The reason I love America is because... Add three examples; close with repetition. My daughter discovers that the answer to the question here is that she loves America because of "freedom." Huh? That's some pretty heavy irony, don't you think? You must write that you love America, you must write that you love America because of the freedom you experience, and you must follow this specific format in writing your response. I mean if it was a movie you'd be rolling your eyes that this was laying it all on pretty think, right?

(Reid writes elsewhere about the factors leading him to consider home-schooling his daughter.)

I assume the part about the dance floor is metaphorical...

2008-02-18T03:47:00.001-05:00

Your time of day has a split personality -- sometimes it's sweat-streaked and loud, and you're on the dance floor, getting your third wind, and shouting lyrics like you'll never run out of energy. You are the time of night that carves itself into your memory forever, because you'll never forget how much you love these people and this moment and this song. It's not always about unforgettable parties, though. Sometimes your late night (err... early morning) burst of energy happens when you're home alone. Those are the times when you say, "I flat out refuse to go to sleep until I finish reading this book, or typing this page, or reorganizing my entire closet." In either case, you are the time of night when it feels sort of forbidden to be awake, but you love accomplishing something special long after everyone else went to bed. And hey -- you can always catch up on sleep tomorrow, right?

CFP: International Society for the History of Rhetoric

2008-02-14T06:01:00.000-05:00

Almost didn't see this one in time...

The Seventeenth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) will be held in Montreal, Canada, from Wednesday, July 22th July to Sunday, July 26 2009.

The biennial conference of ISHR brings together several hundred specialists in the history of rhetoric from around thirty countries. This will be the first meeting of the Society in Canada since 1997.

SCHOLARLY FOCUS OF THE CONFERENCE
The Society calls for papers that focus on the theory and practice of rhetoric in its historical contexts from classical period to the present.

The main theme of the conference is "Innovative Perspective in the History of Rhetoric". Over the last two decades, new fields of investigation have emerged in the research being done in the history of rhetoric – or should we say "Histories of rhetorics". New spheres of activities (religious studies, queer studies, feminist writings, etc.) as much as new geographical areas (Amerindian, Asian and African traditions, among others) have questioned the a priori of a universal and hegemonic model based on a classical and occidental definition of the history of rhetoric. Papers exploring these new trends in Western and Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas are welcomed.

Papers are also invited on every aspect of the history of rhetoric in all periods and languages and the relationship of rhetoric to poetics, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, politics, law, and other elements of the cultural context.

PROCEDURE FOR SUBMISSION
Proposals should be submitted for a 20-minute presentation delivered in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, or Spanish.

Group proposals are welcome, under the following conditions. The group must consist of 3 or 4 speakers dealing with a common theme in order to form a coherent panel. One person must be responsible for the panel. Each paper must stand on its own as an independent presentation. Each speaker submits a proposal form for his or her own paper; proposals for such papers must specify the group for which they are intended. In addition, the person who is responsible for the group must complete and submit a form explaining the purpose of the proposed panel.

Proposals for papers and for groups must be submitted on-line (http://www.ishr.mcgill.ca). Please fill out the on-line form carefully.

Proposals may also be sent by mail to the following address:
Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, McGill University, Department of French Language and Literature, 853 Sherbrooke West, Montreal (Qc), Canada H3A 2T6.

Guidelines for preparing proposals are provided at the bottom of this message. The length of the abstracts must not exceed 350 words.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS
The deadline for submitting proposals is May 15th, 2008.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in September 2008. In a few cases participants may require an earlier acceptance date in order to secure funding. We will try to accommodate such requests if they are made with appropriate documentation.

Information about the conference, including accommodation at negotiated favorable rates, will be provided during the academic year 2008-2009. The conference registration fee is still to be determined; by way of indication it was around 125 euros / 150 US dollars for the previous conferences. Graduate students and scholars from certain countries may be eligible for reduced registration fees.

Looking forward to your participation,

Diane Desrosiers-Bonin
President, International Society for the History of Rhetoric

Guidelines for the preparation of proposals :
The members of ISHR come from many countries and academic disciplines. The following guidelines are intended to make it easier for us to come together and understand one another's proposals. The Program Committee recommends that all proposals contain:

1) a definition - accessible to a non-specialist - of the field of the proposal, including chronological period, language, texts, and other sources;

2) a statement of the problem that will be treated; its place in relation to the present state of research in the field under consideration; its stakes for the history of rhetoric;

3) a summary of the stages of argumentation involved in treating the problem;

4) scientific results and gains.

Somebody help me...

2008-02-11T11:20:00.001-05:00

I've just used "thematize", "narrativize," and "textualize" all together in one paragraph.

Does anyone have an enema for my brain?

Some interesting posts to get back to when I have time

2008-02-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

These posts are all related to access in academic publishing--access to publications (as a writer) and open access to published resources (in other words, open access).

Christmas –time Simultaneous Submission of Multiple Articles, on Suresh Canagarajah's blog (contains comments from Clyde Warden that I think I agree with!)
open access publishing, on digital digs, which links to
open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals, on apophenia

(I know, I should really figure out del.icio.us one of these days...)

CNY Vignettes

2008-02-09T04:55:00.000-05:00

Kerim has a post illustrating more-or-less what my CNY (Chinese New Year) has been like so far. More or less because I've been trying to work in the midst of CNY festivities and have been less successful at work than Kerim seems to have been.

Last year we took off the day after CNY to go to Oberlin. So this year we're spending some time with the in-laws (who fortunately have a net connection), and I'm prepared. I've brought along a big huge book to read and some of my dissertatables. But I don't have my laptop along because I figure(d) I can use the computer in the living room when no one else is at it. I don't want to spend too much time hiding up in the third floor bedroom away from everyone. That'd be unsociable.

When we get there I find that my biggest competition for computer time, my five-year-old nephew, is coming CNY Eve--a surprise since I thought they wouldn't show until the next day at least. Oh well. I always have my book.

Reading turns out to be OK, but I have to do it in our third-floor bedroom away from all the noise going on downstairs. I have to wrap myself up in a couple of blankets, too, since the room is about 10 degrees C. (That's cold!) After a few hours of that, my very long American nose has icicles hanging from it.

***

The red envelope in the nephew's pocket keeps falling out, and finally his mom can't stand it anymore and tells him she's confiscating it. He says, "You can have it."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Does it still have money in it?"

"Yes, it does." Pause. "I love you, so I'm giving it to you."

From what I know about Hakka families, family members don't say "I love you" very much, so my sister-in-law's face registers a combination of emotions: tenderness mixed with shock mixed with embarrassment. (He's sure to make use of this the next time his dad yells at him.)

***

A couple of days later, I finally get a chance to spend some time on the diss. during a lull in the computer use. I gather up my Oolong tea and my dissertatables and set myself in front of the computer. Pop in my flash drive, open up my new chapter in Word. I decide to resave my file under a new name, just in case, but find that I can't find the "Save as..." function. (They have a really new version of Word, all crazy colors and undecipherable icons and I can't do a thing with it...) So I give up on resaving and just start working. A few minutes later I want to insert a footnote and find I can't find the insert footnote function, either. So I end up copying and pasting another footnote and changing its content. Whatever.

After about 10 minutes of this, the nephew comes over wondering what game I'm playing. We end up playing the crazy taxi driver game on the computer instead, since we agree my game wasn't as interesting as this is. The crazy taxi driver game is where you drive the wrong way down streets, through parks and lakes, into mailboxes and palm trees and up walls in order to get your fares to their destinations asap. (It's great training for future drivers here.) We play that until dinner time. After dinner visitors come by and you pretty much can't dissertate in the living room when you've got company. Lots of folks ask me how my dissertation is going and tell me I need to work harder on it.

***

It finally happens--something I've been worrying would happen for years. With an evil grin on his face, my nephew comes up to me as we're all sitting in the living room, looks at me, and announces, "Meiguo ren!" *Sigh* My own nephew... Maybe I shouldn't have insisted that he call me "Uncle" in English...

Despite that, my wife and I take him out to a coffee house/amusement park-type something or other place (undefinable this place is) the next day. He and I take a ride on a little train that runs around the park, we get him a balloon, and he runs around for a while, which worries us (especially when he runs down the 45 degree hill to the parking lot). But he's pretty well behaved and doesn't call me "Meiguo ren" anymore, so I can't complain.

So I haven't gotten a whole lot of work so far since 2/6, but I suppose when I look back on this winter break, I won't count it a total loss. And we still have a few weeks until the spring semester starts, so I'm not totally without hope.

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

2008-01-31T00:10:00.000-05:00

We visited Chung-Yo Dept. Store last night and, as usual, spent most of the time in the Eslite Bookstore there. I picked up two interesting, picture-filled books about Taiwan:

台灣西方文明初體驗 (Taiwan's First Experiences of Western Civilization), by 陳柔縉 (Chen Rouxin). This has some interesting chapters in it about how aspects of "Western Civilization" like toothpaste, running water, and English first entered Taiwan. (A lot seems to have come via the Japanese.)
一九五0年代的臺灣 (1950s Taiwan), by 吳昆財 (Wu Kuncai). This is an illustrated history of Taiwan in the 1950s. (For some reason, LibraryThing has this book mixed up with a book of Japanese manga...?)

Anyway, I can look through these while the in-laws are playing mah-jong...

The socially inept interviewer, or, Things I wish we had covered in the methods course

2008-01-23T00:12:00.000-05:00

Dear Miss Manners,

Semi-hypothetical situation: You're writing an e-mail to people you want to interview. You want to ask them about some experiences they had, say, thirty or forty years ago. At the time, they were a couple and you have no information that indicates that they are no longer together. So you write to them both: "Mr. and Mrs. X" (or something like that, depending on circumstances).

You get a response from one of them, using the first person singular throughout. S/he is willing to do the interview. But you really want to interview the other member of that couple, too. How do you ask the person who responded to you about the other person?

(Stop looking at me like that! I told you I was socially inept from the beginning!)

New mantra

2008-01-10T23:52:00.001-05:00

Provided by the inimitable ERG:

Gonna be all done
When I'm forty-one.

We'll see...

Bill Degenaro on his tenure portfolio

2008-01-07T21:20:00.000-05:00

Bill Degenaro at the University of Michigan Dearborn has two posts up about working on his tenure portfolio. I'm hoping he says more about the process, but perhaps there are some things he wouldn't want to go into (just like I wouldn't want to go too much into my feelings about the three-year review process that some of us are in here). He does mention one thing that I think is similar with our situation here:

The university-wide format does not always allow for easy articulation of the work of humanists. I can see how some of the categories that represent the work of scientists can cause anxiety. I have nothing to put under patents, licensures, synergistic activities (the example given in the tenure guidelines literature: "developed a methodology for modeling and analysis of system robustness"... err, I haven't done that), or technical reviews. Does that make me look weak? Conversely, I find myself relegating some work--writing entries for encyclopedias, chairing the 4Cs nominating committee--to "other" sections.

We have a three-year review form tailored (I think) to the College of Arts faculty, but there are still a few things that need to be ironed out about it. In the version that I used (given to us in Excel worksheet format, natch), you could get 100 points in research for publishing in an SSCI ranked journal, 80 for publishing in TSSCI, and 50 for other journals. No distinction was made for A&HCI or THCI. (This situation will be changed in the near future, I hope.)

Fortunately, I haven't been required to detail any synergistic activities I've been involved in (sounds mighty personal, if you ask me).

CFP: "Re-visioning English Studies in Asia"

2008-01-07T00:11:00.000-05:00

Looks interesting...

“Re-visioning English Studies in Asia”

The English Language and Literature Association of Korea
International Conference
November 20-22, 2008
Onyang Hot Spring Hotel, Onyang, Korea

The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK) invites papers for its 2008 international conference on “Re-visioning English Studies in Asia.” The conference aims at bringing together scholars and teachers of English language and literature to discuss academic, professional, and institutional issues particular to English studies in the wider Asian region. We are interested in examining the history of English studies in Asia—its past, present, and future—in different national and cultural contexts around Asia. How is “English” defined today in Asia? What are the particular responsibilities and challenges of this field today? We hope to foster new cross-cultural and cross-regional conversations that will lay the basis for cooperative projects and debates in the future.

Topics of discussion may include (but are not limited to):

- Teaching English Literature in English vs. Teaching English Literature in an Asian Language
- ESL/EFL Policies at the National/State Level
- Canon and Curriculum
- English Literature and Cultural Capital
- Whose Asia? Orientalism and Occidentalism
- Contemporary Asian Literature in English
- English Studies in Asia in the Age of Theory
- Nationalism/Transnationalism in Asia
- Globalization Theories and Literary Studies
- Asian-American Studies in Asia
- Diversifying “English Literature”
- The South Asian Novel in English
- Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies in Asia
- Writing/Mapping Asia: Representing Asia in English Literature
- Effective Pedagogical Strategies to Manage the Asian Classroom
- Diaspora Studies
- (Bilingualism & Multilingualism in) Inter-Asia Studies
- Digital/Computation and English Studies in Asia

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include a 250-word abstract and a brief curriculum vitae with contact and affiliation information. Please send proposals to Dr. Eun Kyung Min (Dept. of English, Seoul National University, eunmin_at_snu.ac.kr) by March 1, 2008. Proposals for panels are also welcome. Accepted papers will be announced by April 15, 2008. Please consult www.ellak.or.kr for updates and announcements.

(via)

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

2008-01-02T05:51:00.000-05:00

First, a Christmas gift from my brother and sister-in-law:

The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick (1958)
Read it before, but didn't have my own copy.

Two books that came today:

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2005)
Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior by Erving Goffman (1967)

I suspect I'll dip into these two during the winter vacation (when I'm not dissertating, of course. Ahem...)

The Bridges at Toko-Ri

2007-12-23T01:39:00.000-05:00

Picked up a collection of William Holden movies the other day, mainly to watch The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), which is based on a novel James Michener wrote a couple of years after The Voice of Asia came out. Despite my general aversion to war movies, I found myself taken in by much of the movie. I'm still trying to figure out how that happened.

One reason, I think, was the characterization of the protagonist, Lt. Harry Brubaker, as portrayed by Holden. He's an unwilling hero--he's been drafted back into the Navy after serving in WWII and he seems deeply resentful of the fact that he has to be fighting in Korea when other people don't. He wants to get back to his family and career in the States. When he complains to his commander, Admiral Tarrant, Tarrant tells him, "You fight because you're here," suggesting that an unavoidable fate has brought Brubaker (and the U.S.) to this place.

Brubaker gets a chance to visit his wife and children in Japan, but then has to return to duty. The time with his family is perhaps there to remind viewers of what Brubaker is sacrificing. Tarrant has a chance to tell Brubaker's wife Nancy about the dangerous mission her husband will be going on soon because the Admiral feels that his own son, who died in battle, should have told his wife more about what he was going through. Tarrant seems to resent the fact that, as he puts it, people in the U.S. are so comfortably separated from what is going on in the war.

When Brubaker finds out that he has to participate in the bombing of some key enemy bridges at Toko-Ri, he becomes visibly sick. Brubaker's nervousness, frustration, and (I think) fear at the prospect of losing his life is understated, but well-portrayed by Holden. There's one scene where he is trying to write a letter to Nancy, but keeps crumpling up the paper when the sound of jets overhead disturbs him. He goes up on deck and stands, staring at the sea for a while, then finally wipes the sweat (and tears?) off of his face before going back below.

After Brubaker is shot down during the climactic bombing run, and shortly before he and a comrade die in a firefight in an irrigation ditch, he repeats Tarrant's words ("You fight because you're here") to his comrade, suggesting that he has accepted his fate.

The Wikipedia article on the movie says that this isn't a propaganda film. Perhaps not in a traditional sense--I think the characterization of the protagonist is more complex than in a typical war film of that era (though people who have watched more war movies than I have can disagree). But I think there's an element of propaganda in how the film argues that Americans need to be aware of the sacrifices that the men in the military are making to fight against Communism. Even if Brubaker is an unwilling hero, chosen by fate to be there, in the end he does his duty and doesn't question the need to fight--and neither does his wife. Perhaps it's a propaganda film for a more sophisticated audience, or for an audience that was not yet convinced that the Cold War demanded sacrifices?

Yang Tianshi's talk about CKS's diaries

2007-12-18T04:46:00.000-05:00

Prof. Yang Tianshi, who was visiting Taiwan for a conference at Tunghai that took place over the weekend, gave a talk today about Chiang Kai-shek's diaries, which are currently deposited in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Prof. Yang and the moderator of today's talk, Lu Fang-shang, discussed quite a few topics related to the use of Chiang's diaries in historical research. I'm going to try to read my hen-scratchy notes and see what I can make out of their talk. (By the way, Yang and Lu were interviewed recently for an article in Yazhou Zhoukan.)

Prof. Yang described the diaries, mentioning that CKS rather consistently kept a diary between 1915 and 1972 (3 years before his death). He said that at first, CKS's entries were brief (about 30 characters in length), but got longer around the time of the war with Japan. He noted that CKS also engaged in weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries/reflections.

A screen shot of two pages from one of Chiang's diaries.
(There's a short article about Chiang's diaries here.)

Prof. Yang argued that Chiang's diaries were written mainly for himself rather than being written with an eye to future publication. He said that two key pieces of evidence for this are how much CKS cursed (罵) people close to him, and how much private, even confessional, material is in the diaries. (CKS used to give himself demerits for looking lustily at women.) Prof. Yang argued that CKS would not have wanted this kind of material to be made public. (BTW, as Prof. Lu mentioned, the confessions and self-criticism in CKS's diaries didn't necessarily turn him into a saint...) One result of the private nature of Chiang's diaries, according to Prof. Yang, is that we can learn a lot more about what was really going on in CKS's head at certain important historical moments, such as the 1926 Zhongshan Warship Incident and the 1936 Xi'an Incident.

One thing I wondered about is the role of CKS's diaries in subject formation, and the models that CKS had for his diaries. Prof. Yang mentioned the long history of figures in China who used diaries as tools for self-cultivation. He also discussed how well-read CKS was (particularly, he said, for a military man). Evidently CKS's diaries record his readings in the Confucian classics (particularly the Yijing), Christian works, and Eastern and Western philosophy. I found myself wondering what someone in writing studies or rhetorical studies would do with these diaries--perhaps analyze how the diaries constructed CKS as a reading and writing subject.

One last thing that Prof. Yang mentioned--he said that Chiang's status has risen in China from that of a devil (鬼) to a human (人), while in Taiwan, coincidentally, it seems his status has gone from god to human. (No one commented on the immediate political conditions that might be responsible for that coincidence.)

All in all, Professor Yang's speech was quite engaging--the room was packed, too (though I had the feeling a lot of students were there because they had to be. Ahem...)

More on machine translation

2007-12-17T05:47:00.001-05:00

I was warning my students today about the dangers of using "full-sentence translation" features on their electronic dictionaries, giving examples that I've talked about before (here and here).

Now I've got a new example: Danwei has a recent post about Google's machine translation, which says,

A Danwei reader sent in Google's translation for the English word "flippant". It comes out as "刺杀布什的凶手" or "the assassin who stabbed Bush" (see this screen shot).

(For why that happened, check out the original post.)

Upcoming speech about Chiang Kai-shek's diaries

2007-12-16T12:05:00.000-05:00

「東海大學教學卓越計畫---人文通識訓練」通識課程學術講座

講題:「蔣介石日記」與兩岸民國史研究

講者:楊天石教授(中國社會科學院近代史研究所研究員)
呂芳上教授(東海大學歷史系教授)

時間:96年12月18日星期二14:00~16:00

地點:H122

歡迎踴躍聽講!!

Sounds interesting. I'll try to attend...

American food in Taichung, circa 1960?

2007-12-12T23:40:00.000-05:00

Just taking a break from working on the diss.--specifically, from harassing would-be interviewees with pages of detailed questions about things that they probably don't remember writing. (I mean, I don't remember what I wrote 10 years ago--why should they remember what they wrote 30 or 50 years ago?)

Had a nice bagel and coffee for breakfast (at Bagels 'n Beans), which has got me thinking about Western food in Taichung around the time that I'm covering in my dissertation. A few mentions in letters of having Thanksgiving turkeys (or Christmas turkeys) at Tunghai. Where'd they come from? Were they locally raised? I also recall mentions of the U.S. Officer's Club where people sometimes went to eat. Anyone have an address on that? I seem to vaguely remember seeing it somewhere a long time ago, but I don't remember where.

CFP: Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse

2007-12-11T05:31:00.000-05:00

Call for Abstracts
4th Conference on
Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse

June 3‐5, 2008
Indiana University‐Purdue University Indianapolis
Sponsored by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication

Plenary Speakers
Dwight Atkinson, Purdue University
Julie Belz, IUPUI
Christine Feak, University of Michigan
Françoise Salager‐Meyer, Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela

Papers are invited on topics including (but not limited to):
Theoretical and empirical investigations
Language‐ and culture‐specific studies
Changing methodologies for research
Practical applications
Teaching and classroom practices
Writing in school and college
Writing in business and professional settings
Orality and literacy connections
Critical approaches to contrastive rhetoric
Deadline for Submission: May 1, 2008

Papers should be 20 minutes long with an additional 10 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words long, typed on a single page. In the upper left‐hand corner, place the submitter's name, address, institutional affiliation, phone and fax numbers, and e‐mail address.

Send submissions to:
IR Conference Planning Committee
Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication
Indiana University‐Purdue University Indianapolis
620 Union Drive, room 407 Indianapolis, IN 46202, U.S.A.

For more information:
(317) 274‐2555
E‐mail: icic@iupui.edu
http://www.iupui.edu/~icic/IRconference.htm

Registration Fees:
$100 early registration,
$115 onsite registration
$50 student registration,
$65 onsite student registration

Inaugural issue of Taiwan in Comparative Perspective out

2007-12-10T21:09:00.000-05:00

Just found out that the first issue of this e-journal, published by the Taiwan Culture Research Programme at the London School of Economics, came out in November. Here's its table of contents--the links go directly to the articles' pdfs (I have already asked them to set up an RSS feed):

Articles

‘Communism’ in Taiwan and the Mainland: Transmission of the Great Leap Famine and of the White Terror
Stephan Feuchtwang

Death-Scapes in Taipei and Manila: A Postmodern Necrography
Paul-François Tremlett

The Intrusive Rendering: Dictation of Stereotypes and the Extra-Ordinary
Doreen Bernath

Commentaries

The EU Two-Level Sovereignty System as Model for Taiwan and China
Bengt Johansson

Ethnicity in the Politics of the Unreal
Allen Chun

The 'Red' Tide Anti-Corruption Protest: What Does it Mean for Democracy in Taiwan?
Fang-long Shih

Reviews

Huang Zhang-jian (2007) Er-er-ba shijian zhenxiang kaozheng gao (The Truth about 2-28: Assessing the Documents)
Stefan Fleischauer

Shao-li Lu (2005) Zhanshi Taiwan: quanli, kongjian yu zhimin tongzhi de xingxiang biaoshu (Exhibiting Taiwan: Power, Space and Image Representation of Japanese Colonial Rule)
Edward Vickers

Mark Harrison, Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge in the making of Taiwanese identity
Paul-François Tremlett

Response to Tremlett's Review of Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge in the making of Taiwanese identity
Mark Harrison

By the way, the editors mention in their submission guidelines that academic article submissions to the journal "should contain a comparative perspective in the widest sense. This could mean comparisons between Taiwan and other parts of the world, Taiwan in the past and in the present, different regions and cultures of Taiwan, or different methodological and disciplinary approaches to the study of a theme or issue concerning Taiwan."