Urban Religion Reading Group Second Discussion | Consuming Religion by Kathryn Lofton

Time and Date: Tuesday 2 March 8:00AM China Time (7:00PM EST)

Zoom ID : 451 154 2347

About the speaker:

Kathryn Lofton is the Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Professor of History and Divinity, and Dean of the Humanities at Yale University. She is the author of Oprah: The Goaspel of an Icon (2011) and Consuming Religion (2017). The online version of the book can be found on Duke Library: https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE009692522?utm_campaign=bento&utm_content=bento_result_link&utm_source=library.duke.edu&utm_medium=referral

About Urban Religion Reading Group:

Urban religion reading group is a reading group on the theme of “Religions and Cities” broadly conceived. In recent years, with the rapid urbanization processes, increasing academic interests have been turned to religious groups, organizations, sites and practices in the city. This reading group would serve as a portal through which faculty and students alike can engage in direct conversation and exchange with the most current scholarship on religions and cities. In the Spring 2021 semester, four reading group discussions would be held. People will read one book for each discussion, and the author of that book would be invited to join the live discussion.

In the discussion, the chair will first introduce the author and the book briefly and ask the author about the background and the origin of the book, then the floor will be open for discussion. Everyone is welcome to prepare a set of questions or comments for people to discuss. While it would be helpful to read the book before this discussion, everyone who is interested in the topic is welcome to join no matter if you have read the book.

The Thursday Night Tea Research Group | INTIMACY with Camila Gonzatto

February 25, 7-8:15pm CST

IB 1010 / Zoom 298 656 1787

In the spirit of intimacy, the award-winning filmmaker and writer will share with us the first short film (12min) she ever made and then talk about the experience and what she has learned since. She will then give the audience a task which will combine intimacy with filmmaking, so bring your cellphones with you!

Light food and drinks provided.

Camila Gonzatto is a filmmaker, writer, and designer. She obtained her PhD in literary theory and creative writing at PUCRS (Brazil), with a 3-semester exchange at Freie Universität Berlin. She is the co-editor of books on Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Creative Writing. She has been working with content creation for film, TV, websites, magazines, and museums for more than 15 years.

Whose Karate? Language and Cultural Learning in a Multilingual Karate Club in London

Date: Feb.26, 2021

Time: 8 pm (China time)/7 am (EST)/12pm (UK time)

Zoom Meeting ID: 988 6817 2079

This talk aims to explore language learning as a process of cultural translation and translanguaging. The empirical base of the argument draws upon a sociolinguistic ethnography of translanguaging practices in a karate club in east London, UK.  Through examining whose karate and how cultural traditions, values and practices are translated and why, I broaden the concept of language and regard it as a multifaceted sense- and meaning-making resource and explore the theoretical implications of taking language teaching and learning as a process of cultural translation.

About the speaker

Zhu Hua is Chair of Educational Linguistics in School of Education, University of Birmingham and Director of MOSAIC Group for Research in Multilingualism. She is Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences, the UK. Her main research interests span across multilingual and intercultural communication and child language. Among her recent publications are Exploring Intercultural Communication: Language in Action (2019 Routledge, 2nd edition), Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life, and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities (2016, Routledge, with Adam Komisarof) and Research Methods in Intercultural Communication (2016, Blackwell). She is book series co-editor for Routledge Studies in Language and Intercultural Communication, Cambridge Key Topics in Applied Linguistics and Cambridge Elements in Applied Linguistics.

Please RSVP here: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cUPkFcuxEbTXsoe.

This event will be recorded and posted on the Third Space Lab’s Sakai site for all to view.

Finding Midori: Being, Becoming and Belonging

By Hajra Farooqui

Class of 2022

The literature faculty of the Arts and Humanities division at Duke Kunshan University have organized a Literature Reading Series sponsored by the Humanities Research Center. Throughout this semester, the center will host an array of guest speakers from around the world as they present and discuss their work with students and faculty. The first speaker for this series was Brandon Shimoda, an award-winning poet and non-fiction writer. Shimoda’s most recent books are The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), a lyric portrait of his grandfather which received the PEN Open Book Award, and The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018). Connecting with us on Zoom, Shimoda read sections from The Grave on the Wall, followed by a discussion of his research process and a Q/A session led by students. The talk was facilitated by Professor Stephanie Anderson, Assistant Professor of American Literature at DKU and a longtime friend and colleague of Shimoda.

“A grandfather is a strange, somewhat impossible work of conscience, especially when old, especially when in a state of decline, on the verge of appearing to dream.”

Shimoda describes The Grave on the Wall as a book about his grandfather and a book about being a grandchild. In this work, he explores how to write about somebody who occupies a special place in one’s life. Oftentimes grandparents know about our lives intimately, including the nooks and crevices of our minds. However, the tragedy is that we seldom can say the same about our grandparents and the lives they have led. Shimoda’s work is at the crossroads of this struggle, of knowing and unknowing. This makes The Grave on the Wall a work driven by emotion in which he retraces his grandfather’s life through memory, stories, Japanese folklore and dreams. Continue reading “Finding Midori: Being, Becoming and Belonging”

Media and Arts Speaker Series | Curating the Curatorial: A Lab for “Applied Curating”

The Media & Arts Speaker series at Duke Kunshan University is a bi-weekly event that invites leading practitioners in media and arts to speak about their work and practice and engage with our DKU community.

The fourth miniseries of talks looks at the concept of the lab, both as a philosophy and a methodology to see how these innovative approaches have impacted and transformed the production of culture, art and society.

The lecture scheduled on Thursday February 25th, 2020 at 5:30pm China Standard Time features the Director and Curator of the Tongji D&I Curatorial Lab Aric Chen. This series is organized and hosted by Prof. Benjamin Bacon and Prof. Vivian, and supported by Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. This event is open to the public.

Time and Date: 5:30pm China time, Thursday February 25th, 2021 / 4:30am EST

Location: Duke Kunshan Innovation Building 1042

Zoom: 262-835-7204 Continue reading “Media and Arts Speaker Series | Curating the Curatorial: A Lab for “Applied Curating””

Urban Religion Reading Group First Discussion | The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao by Ian Johnson

Thursday 11 February 09:00 China Time (20:00 EST February 10)

Zoom ID : 975 8445 4966

Passcode: 170411

About the speaker:

Ian Johnson has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, writing on long-term social issues such as the country’s search for faith and values, as well as political challenges including efforts to control dissent and history. His most recent book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao was named by The Economist and Christian Science Monitor as one of the best books of the year. The online version of the book can be found on Duke library.

About Urban Religion Reading Group:

Urban religion reading group is a reading group on the theme of “Religions and Cities” broadly conceived. In recent years, with the rapid urbanization processes, increaing  academic interests have been turned to religious groups, organizations, sites and practices in the city. This reading group would serve as a portal through which faculty and students alike can engage in direct conversation and exchange with the most current scholarship on religions and cities. In the Spring 2021 semester, four reading group discussions would be held. People will read one book for each discussion, and the author of that book would be invited to join the live discussion.

In this discussion, the chair will first introduce the author and the book briefly and ask the author about the background and the origin of the book, then the floor will be open for discussion. Everyone is welcome to prepare a set of questions or comments for people to discuss. While it would be helpful to read the book before this discussion, everyone who is interested in the topic is welcome to join no matter if you have read the book.

Interdisciplinary Knowledge Network Lab

The Humanities Research Center is pleased to announce the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Knowledge Network Lab, to be co-sponsored by the Humanities Research Center and the Data Science Research Center.

All faculty, staff and students are invited to an information session on Wednesday February 24 from 3-4pm in IB2025 (the recording is now available to watch online). A Zoom link will be provided to those who register for the event and are off campus. To register for the information session please fill out the survey here or scan the QR code.

Summary

The Interdisciplinary Knowledge Network Lab (IKNL) is proposed as a collaborative network to facilitate research into knowledge architecture, metaknowledge, epistemology, semantic processing, knowledge network analysis and knowledge visualization at DKU. Researchers will use big data analysis, philosophical inquiry, and digital humanities methods to investigate how knowledge is structured, represented, analyzed, modeled, theorized and visualized. They will also draw on emerging research in biosemantics regarding the neurological structures that enable linguistic processing to take place in the brain. In addition to these broad theoretical issues in knowledge architecture and engineering, the lab will aim to make a concrete contribution to the analysis and visualization of knowledge production at DKU, Duke or other universities. These include:

  • tools to assess how universities’ research and teaching missions are aligned
  • methods to assess what universities are contributing to the development of human knowledge
  • applications for analyzing, classifying and visualizing knowledge production at universities
  • proposals for how knowledge can be related, synthesized, recombined, or repurposed across disciplines and fields

At the same time, as a vertically-integrated lab, students at various stages in their careers will work with faculty at various stages of their careers in order to share ideas, and build a research and training cluster that will support the mission of the whole university in terms of knowledge innovation and scientific discovery.

Reading Group

The lab will recruit students at an orientation session on February 24. Lab members will then meet weekly in session four in a reading group to deepen their interdisciplinary knowledge in areas related to lab’s mission. These could  include:

  • algorithms for natural language processing and semantic analysis in English and Chinese
  • taxonomy of knowledge as trees, hierarchies, networks or other structures
  • visualization of knowledge networks
  • network models
  • analysis of research paper metadata, citations etc
  • development of applications for academic institutional assessment and analysis
  • biosemantics and cognitive neuroscience
  • social / political implications of the above

This process of building up a cross-disciplinary body of research and training at DKU will enable to lab to support the development of signature work projects in Data Science, Computation and Design, Ethics and Leadership, and Behavioral Science. It will also support the work of faculty researchers whose work lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, neuroscience, data science, ethics and society. Towards the end of the spring semester the lab members will work on the development of specific research projects and seek funding to carry them out beginning in the summer and fall.

Core Leaders

Charles Chang, Assistant Professor of Environment and Urban Studies

Prof. Chang’s research interest hinges on the intersections between computation and design. With the rise of smartphones and other internet-connected devices, design choices become increasingly data-driven and dependent on information’s credibility in the construction of the human habitat. Chang’s research focuses on human habitat design, environmental impact, and information credibility in the big-data age. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include computational social science, digital humanities, and urban informatics.

Wanying He, (student co-director), DKU’22

Wanying He is an undergraduate of the class of 2022 majoring in Data Science. Her research interests lie in knowledge architecture, natural language processing, semantic analysis and modeling, and the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity.

Sze Chai Kwok, Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

Prof. Kwok’s research lies at the intersection among neuroscience, behavior, and psychology. He is head of the Laboratory of Phylo-Cognition and his research team studies the neural bases of episodic memory, metacognition, and other related higher cognitive processes in the primate species. Elucidation of such intricate brain/mind/behavior relationships is attained by armamentaria of methods including multimodal neuroimaging, in vivo electrophysiology, neuromodulatory methods, state-of-the-art behavioral paradigms and computational techniques. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include topics within cognitive neuroscience, behavioral sciences, and psychology.

James Miller (faculty co-director), Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Strategy

James Miller is known worldwide as a scholar of Daoism and Ecology. He has published three monographs and four edited volumes, and his writing has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese and Farsi. He is Professor of Humanities, co-director of the Humanities Research Center, and Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Strategy at Duke Kunshan University.

Ivan Mura, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ivan Mura has a computer science background and a passion for interdiscilinary applications of modeling. His research interests focus on techniques and applications of predictive and prescriptive data analytics to artificial and living systems, and the integration of measurement data into axiomatic modeling.

Daniel Weissglass, Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Daniel Weissglass has two major research programs: the fundamentals of cognition; and science, health, and technology policy. The fundamentals of cognition program explores intersections between philosophy and the cognitive sciences to improve our understanding of the mind and its operations. His science, health, and technology policy research explores ethical, epistemic, and political challenges arising from contemporary advances in technology and develops policy recommendations to address these challenges.

Registration

To register for. the information session please fill out the survey here or scan the QR code.