Summer writing project (Day Forty-One)

I did some thinking about my topic and paper today, but mainly I was working on my course materials for the class I'll be teaching next week (!).

I also "attended" a webinar on Taiwan Studies, "The State of Taiwan Studies: A Roundtable Discussion on Methods and Directions," run by the Fairbank Center. The panelists were:

• Jaw-Nian Huang, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
• Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
• Kevin Wei Luo, Doctoral Fellow, Hou Family fellow in Taiwan Studies, Harvard University
• Lev Nachman, PhD in political science, UC Irvine

The discussant (who actually didn't get a chance to say a lot, but raised an important question for the panelists), was Ching-fang Hsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

There was a big emphasis among the speakers on Taiwan's geopolitical relations and status and the importance of studying Taiwan in terms of these geopolitical considerations. As Lawrence Yang put it (and this might not be an exact quote, but pretty close): Taiwan can be seen as "both an outcome of geopolitical mediation among empires or Taiwan itself as a medium by which powers create geopolitical mapping." 

The question that Professor Hsu brought up at the end concerned how China should be situated in Taiwan Studies. This is an interesting question (and potentially, the question itself was even more interesting than the answers themselves), and it's something that probably a lot of people studying Taiwan wrestle with. (Prof. Nachman mentioned this, too.) Both this question and the emphasis on geopolitics have confirmed to me that I've got a good idea for this paper that I'm writing. (Though they also remind me that I have to make sure I actually make a clear argument in the paper!)

Here's the YouTube video of the panel.