Events at: Fairmont Social Lounge, St. John's College

CROSSCURRENT 長江圖: Film Screening and A Conversation with Director Yang Chao

  Type: Film Screening and Discussion Speaker: Yang Chao (director of the Silver Bear award winner at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and the latest work, CROSSCURRENT長江圖) “The core of the film is surreal, almost supernatural—a man and a woman from a different time and space travel against each other, progressively and retrogressively at the same.” – […]

The Female Chieftain’s Tribute

During the long history of encounters between the Han and non-Han people, the Han writers produced many texts that represent the non-Han as the other. These texts are in the genres of local gazetteers, travelogues and miscellaneous notes, and they narrate about the geographical, institutional and social traits of the non-Han regions and people. Among […]

Symposium: What is China?

Those scholars who are concerned with Chinese academic circles will notice that since 2010 China has published many different works about “China.” All of these works deal with the topic of “What is China?”. Why, since 2010, have Chinese academics, especially in history, been specifically concerned about the question of “what is China”? In other […]

The Incentive to Innovate? The Behaviour of Local Policymakers in China

Despite playing a key contributory role in China’s recent economic reforms and the Party’s regime durability, there has been a noted reduction in central-level policy experimentation under Xi Jinping’s administration. Although these changes at the central-level are filtering down to local officials, a great deal of variation in policy experimentation exists. How do local officials filter these institutional changes to the extent of observed variations in local policy innovation?

Humans vs. Robots: (Re)valuating the Worth of Work in the Age of Automation

This study addresses how business actors construct the worth of work in their effort to replace human workers with robots. Whereas existing literature takes for granted the valuation of unskilled manual work, I frame efforts to increase automation as an opportunity to examine the often socially invisible yet power-ridden process of valuation. I use the […]