Student Report on the Opening of the Statelessness Conference
Reported by Cody Schmidt, class of 2025
This talk is part of Duke Kunshan’s Statelessness Conference, a 2-day event held from December 1st to 2nd showcasing multi-disciplinary research conducted by faculty both in and outside of DKU. The Statelessness Conference focuses on the story of refugeeism in Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War.
Duke Kunshan’s Statelessness Conference began on December 1st, with a welcome and introduction led by Duke Kunshan’s Professor Kolleen Guy and Professor Jay Winter from Yale. The event was held at the IES Center in Barcelona, with additional guests joining over Zoom. The Statelessness Conference is a presentation of work by DKU faculty and guests focusing on statelessness and refugees in Asia and the Pacific during World War II. This project has been several years in the making, with DKU undergraduate students laying the foundation for the work prior to the COVID-19 pandemic by collecting and reconstructing narratives of stateless individuals. These students received a special thank-you from Professor Guy. (more…)
Student Report on the Statelessness Conference – Family Narratives in Art
Reported by Cody Schmidt, class of 2025
This talk is part of Duke Kunshan’s Statelessness Conference, a 2-day event held from December 1st to 2nd showcasing multi-disciplinary research conducted by faculty both in and outside of DKU. The Statelessness Conference focuses on the story of refugeeism in Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War.
Poet Peter Balakian (Colgate University) and visual artist Mary Behrens joined Professors Kolleen Guy and Jay Winter in an event for Duke Kunshan’s Statelessness Conference, speaking on the role of art in developing and remembering family narratives surrounding statelessness. Balakian and Behrens have family members who were stateless and feel a deep postmemory attachment to their ancestors’ stories, choosing to represent and connect to them through their work. Balakian began by posing the question: “What can we, as artists, offer to the complex problems of statelessness, the histories of refugees? What kind of knowledge can we bring in our arts?” (more…)
HRC Citizenship Lab is Seeking a Research Assistant
HRC CITIZENSHIP LAB IS SEEKING A RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Application due date: December 18, 2022
To apply, please send CV and cover letter to citizenshiplab@dukekunshan.edu.cn
Workload: Project based, and up to 10hrs/week (40 RMB/hour)
Starting date: Immediately
Main Duties and Responsibilities: Assisting the Lab co-directors with Lab-related research activities. This may include, but is not limited to, identifying potential guest speakers; assisting the lab directors with bibliographic research for citizenship-related publications; and identifying case studies and other materials for inclusion in article and book manuscripts written by the Lab co-directors or affiliates. (more…)
Statelessness Conference: Part Two – Refugees in Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War
‘Statelessness’ meeting part two will be held in Melbourne from December 15-16, 2022. Learn more about part one of ‘Statelessness’ and the conference that just concluded in Barcelona on December 1-2, 2022.
This meeting is organized by Kolleen Guy and Jay Winter, co-sponsored by the Humanities Research Center and the Arts and Humanities Division at Duke Kunshan University.
Melbourne Conference Dates: December 15-16, 2022
Location: Catholic University of Australia, Level 3, 250 Victoria Parade, in Fitzroy.
Zoom: 680 6042 755
Program
Freedom Lab Film Screening: Stagecoach
Date/Time: Dec 14, 5:30pm China time
Location: IB lecture hall (in-person only)
Drinks and snacks will be served!
The film screening will be followed by a talk, as part of Freedom Lab’s US Studies Speakers’ Series, from Boris Vejdovsky on Dec 15, 4pm China time. Learn more about the talk >>
Additionally, the DKU library has the ebook of the shooting script of the movie: https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE006077943.
Freedom Lab Presents: US Studies Speakers’ Series – Boris Vejdovsky
Date/Time: Dec 15, 4pm China time
Location: Zoom ID 334 3189 585
Speaker: Boris Vejdovsky (University of Lausanne, Switzerland）
The speaker will be discussing the film, Stagecoach, an early Western, in 1939. Freedom Lab will have a film screening the evening before, on Dec 14, 5:30pm China time. Learn more here >>
The Global Performance of American Culture: Rhetoric and Symbolic Forms in American Western Movies
The Western has often been read as a quintessentially American form of popular art, a genre that has expressed over decades the moods and anxieties of the nation. While many studies have shown that the Western metonymically expresses the social, political, racial, and sexual tensions of the nation, relatively little attention has been paid to its aesthetic and political forms. In other words, many critics have paid attention to what the Western says, but not so much to how it does it; while it is always dangerous to seek to oppose form and content, I propose to focus on the rhetoric and the prosody the Western. (more…)
Student Report on Teaching Intercultural Citizenship in Universities
Reported by Vicky Yongkun Wu, Class of 2026
This talk is part of the Third Space Lab presentations with Irina Golubeva on “Should we teach intercultural citizenship at universities, and what do students think about this?”. The program is broadly associated with research projects related to languages, cultures, and intercultural communication.
The research talk delivered by Dr. Golubeva concentrated on teaching intercultural citizenship in universities and students’ perceptions of the problem. Introduced by the host, Prof Chiocca, Dr. Golubeva is the Professor and the Director of the Master’s Program in Intercultural Communication at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA). Her research interests include but are not limited to the development of intercultural competence and multilingual awareness, internationalization of Higher Education (HE), and conceptualization of active intercultural citizenship. (more…)
Student Report on Visualizing Cities in XR: Activating the Presence of the Past
Reported by Vicky Yongkun Wu, Class of 2026
This talk is part of the Anthropocene XR Lab’s Talk Series: Activating the Presence of the Past with Professor Victoria Szabo, Research Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University.
The research talk delivered by Dr. Szabo concentrated on invoking the past using XR technologies and with the support of literature, documents, and other resources. It is a project of “augmenting the humanities,” reflecting on the humanities heritages and even creating new realities. Among her abundant research projects, Dr. Szabo focused on two in this talk, “Visualizing Venice: Exploring the city’s past” and “Visualizing cities: H. P. Lovecraft’s Providence.”
Citizenship Lab Research Project: “Poetry, translation, and world citizenship in the long 1950s.”
Humanities Research Center’s Citizenship Lab proudly funds Professor Alice Xiang’s research project, Poetry, translation, and world citizenship in the long 1950s.
Project members: Professor Alice Xiang & Research Assistant(s) TBD
Project Summary: This project explores the role of poetry as a key force in the production of solidarity between new and emerging nations in the 1950s. From multilateral peace conferences to transnational poetry anthologies, the works of left-leaning poets such as Nazım Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, and Nicolas Guillén were widely disseminated across a range of mediums during this period, making them highly influential in shaping aspirational forms of internationalist belonging and world citizenship. One of Turkish poet Hikmet’s most popular works, Angina Pectoris (1948), for example, opens with the following lines: “If half my heart is here, doctor / the other half is in China / with the army flowing / toward the Yellow River.”
