The second keynote lecture for the Duke Kunshan Humanities Fall Conference 2020: Hum/Animal, was led by Professor Mylan Engel, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, specializing in epistemology and ethics, with an emphasis on animal ethics, environmental ethics, and global justice. Accordingly, he spoke on the topic of Animal Ethics, Sustainability, and Commonsense: Doing Right by Animals and by Ourselves.Continue reading “Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Mylan Engel on Animal Ethics, Sustainability, and Commonsense”
Humanities Research Center is pleased to announce that the CAC://DKU 2020 Research / Creation Fellowship (USD$10,000) has been awarded to the artist GUO Cheng for his project proposal Wind Verification. Guo will start the 3-month residency program at Chronus Art Center (CAC) and Duke Kunshan University.
Jury Statement
The first collaborative initiative between CAC_Lab and Duke Kunshan University’s Humanities Research Center, the Fellowship aims to support and advance research-based artistic practice, with a particular emphasis on practitioners who employ or interrogate technology in the conception and production of their work. The selection was based on the strength of the proposed project, the proposal’s relevance to this session’s topic (“World Wide What”), and its feasibility.
GUO Cheng is set to dispute the relationship between the common perception of social media as altered, selective representation of reality, and art as means for collective “peer-review” of the unverified viral, in an attempt to provide alternative visions to what post COVID-19 “World Wide What” could become. Wind Verification draws on the practices of the likes of Giuseppe Penone and Forensic Architecture in an attempt to further legitimize creative practices not only as means for critical inquiry but as potential tools to bring about change.
Wind Verification is conceptually powerful and technologically ambitious. The project’s technical framework ranges from the computer vision algorithm analysing crowd-sourced footage scraped from mainly East Asian social media, to a physical installation setting that will use fans to recreate ‘verified wind’ realities. GUO Cheng aims to draw new potential functional purposes for social media and elaborate on a range of tools required for such advances to be achievable. Continue reading “CAC:// DKU 2020 Research/Creation Fellowship Winner Announcement”
Register your interestby Monday, 26 October, 0800 China time for priority consideration
Learn how you can participate in research programs led by the Humanities Research Center. These include our Kunshan Digital Humanities program, our Planetary Ethics and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and other labs and activities. The Humanities Research Center is open to students in all disciplines across the university. Students will gain valuable research experience, work closely with faculty mentors, and can receive funding to carry out projects related to their signature works.
Recently, the three co-directors of the Third Space Lab presented at SIETAR USA to discuss the adaptations of their lab (its research agenda, workshops, training of research assistants, etc.) to the online context, in a session entitled Fostering Perspective Transformation in Third Spaces in Virtual Settings.
International education took an undeniable hit with Covid-19 and its consequences on mobility. While many institutions contemplate the possibility of offering in-person courses, others are reflecting on hybrid models or fully online programs to welcome their students this fall. A consequence of the situation is that pre-departure programs for study abroad sojourns and orientation for international freshmen, when not simply canceled, saw themselves reduced to the bare minimum. Rooted in the interventionist paradigm, which challenges the “immersion myth” that simply being abroad leads to positive intercultural growth and other deep changes, this Ned Talk addresses the virtual adaptations to interventions developed by a humanities research lab, the Third Space Lab(TSL) at a Sino-American higher education institution.
In light of uncertainty regarding study abroad semester for Chinese and international juniors to go to the US, as well as the arrival of incoming freshmen on campus in China, the Third Space Lab moved online to optimize students’ intercultural experiences by offering a series of online workshops, a series of online guest lectures, cultural events, and other resources for various cohorts of students. The virtual workshops address a series of topics including (1) learning about the host culture by creating their own research projects abroad, (2) learning how to reflect, (3) learning strategies for meaningful intercultural encounters, and (4) learning strategies for managing conflict experienced in their intercultural encounters. Guest lectures and cultural events showcase translingual and multicultural Third Spaces stories and encourage students to reflect on their own international education experience in cultural hybridity.
Showcasing TSL’s various virtual events, this Ned Talk addressed the conceptual and practical applications of Transformative Learning via intercultural sensitivity and Third Space personae development principles, as well as via conflict resolution.
For more information about these adaptations, you can watch the recording here:
Chinese Documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang launched The Memory Project in 2010 to collect oral histories from survivors of the Great Famine (1958-1961) in rural China. Since 2010, several young filmmakers have joined the project. They have been to 246 villages in 20 provinces and interviewed more than 1,220 elderly villagers. The Memory Project aims to shine light on one of modern China’s most traumatic episodes, the Great Famine of 1958-1961. The project also covers Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, Land Reform and Collectivization of 1949-1953, the Four Cleanups Movement in 1964 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. The amateur filmmakers from Wu’s studio discovered their family histories and identities in the process of interviewing the villagers, reconciling the official history taught in schools with each family’s experience.
On September 19th, at the Humanities Fall Conference, the Freedom Lab hosted a forum on “Freedom Voices and Struggles Across the Globe.” The forum consisted of presentations and discussions by faculty and student research assistants on their current research projects sponsored by the Freedom Lab. Professor Qian Zhu, along with student researchers Qingyi Yin and Xueyi Liu, presented their ongoing research on the New Village Movement and New Life Movement in Republican China. Professor Jesse Olsavsky as well as Yue Qiu and Henry Stevens presented their work transcribing and editing abolitionist histories of the Haitian Revolution. Professor Bryce Beemer described his new research on the modern history of Burmese temple slaves. Professor Selina Lai Henderson concluded by discussing her work on the Chinese translation of W.E.B. Dubois’s foundational text, The Souls of Black Folk. The Freedom Lab looks forward to the student projects and publications that will emerge from the new research presented at this forum.
FREEDOM’S PROXIMITY: THE INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN AMERICAN SLAVERY, BRITISH COLONIAL ABOLITION, AND SLAVE SHIP REVOLT
BY PROFESSOR JEFFREY R. KERR-RITCHIE, HOWARD UNIVERSITY
Opening Welcome by VCAA Scott Maceachern
Tuesday October 13
9:15 PM-10:30 PM Beijing Time
Zoom ID: 261 330 4845
Abstract
In November 1841, 19 rebels seized the US slave ship Creole transporting 139 slaves from Virginia to Louisiana and steered it to the British Bahamas. After a disputatious week between US officials and British colonial authorities, the slaves walked to freedom and scattered through the region. Drawing upon new historical documents, this talk narrates this fascinating story. It further situates this tale within the context of an expanding empire of American slavery and an expanding empire of British colonial abolition during the mid-nineteenth century.
Bio
Born in London, United Kingdom, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie earned his first history degree at Kingston University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and went on to teach at Wesleyan, Columbia, Penn, SUNY-Binghamton, and UNC-Greensboro. He has been teaching the African Diaspora field at Howard University since 2006. He has been Director of Graduate Studies since 2015. His research interests include slavery, abolition, and post-emancipation societies, especially in North America and the Caribbean during the nineteenth century. He has spoken on these topics in numerous countries, including Cuba, the Netherlands, Egypt, and Vietnam. Alongside numerous articles, he is author of the books Freed People in the Tobacco South (2003); Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (2011); Freedom Seekers: Essays in Comparative Emancipation (2014); and most recently Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade (2019)
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 second short series features Points Center for Contemporary Art (PCCA). Situated in the greater Kunshan region, PCCA is dedicated to building a cultural ecosystem that embraces the local community within Kunshan city. Through this series, we hope to provide students an introduction to the art center, its guiding philosophy, its programs and artists.
The lecture scheduled on Friday September 25th, 2020 at 6pm China Central time features Points 2020 spring resident artists Liao Fei and Zhao Qian where they will share with us their methodology and work. This series is organized and hosted by Prof. Vivian Xu and Prof. Benjamin Bacon, and supported by Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University.