FRIDAY, April 03, 2026
08:30-09:00 Registration and Coffee
AB1079
09:00-09:15 Opening Remarks
AB1079 Carlos rojas, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University
Selina Lai-Henderson, Associate Professor of American Literature & History, DKU
09:15-10:45 Keynote Lecture 1: Ásta, “Social Construction”
AB1079 Chair: carlos rojas
10:45-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Student Panels
AB1079 1A：Food and Consumption
Discussant: Renee Richer
Kymbat Altybay , “The Power of Apricots: Nature, Borders, and Human Mobility in the Fergana Valley”
Marielle Williamson, “The power of your sip”
Felipe Rebello Silvestri,” Carne, Capital, and Cross-Continental Ties: An Ethnographic Study of
Industrial Meat”
AB 3103 1B：Art and Sustainability
Discussant: Erin Wilkerson
Annie Trang Ta , “The Critical Periphery: How the West, Not Southeast Asia, Shape China’s Rare Earth
Vulnerability”
Byerikbol Yerbol, “Engineering nature’s resilience: A literature review on Self-Healing Soft Materials
for a Sustainable Society”
Ermina Kuzerbayeva, “Ecocinema in Central Asia: Environmental Storytelling in Kazakh and Kyrgyz
Film”
AB 3107 1C：Craft and Visuality
Discussant: Adrien Pouille
Le Yen Vy, “Adapting Without Disappearing – Does Market Integration Erode or Enable Authenticity
of Craftsmanship in Vietnam”
Mary Mulualem, “Imagined, Based in Truth: Zoomorphic Imagery in Bronze Age China and
Premodern Chinese Culture”
Ruixiang Hu, “The Architecture of Complicity: The Intruder, the Bourgeois, and the Spectator in
Haneke’s Cinema”
12:30-14:00 Lunch
Community Center
14:00-15:30 Keynote Lecture 2: Liangliang Zhang :” Re-Storying
Ecology: Regenerative Education and Ecological Care from Rural China”
AB1079 Chair: Selina Lai Henderson
15:30-15:45 Coffee Break
15:45-17:15 Student Presentation
AB1079 2A：Gender and Disability
Discussant: Andrew Wortham
Zhuo’er Chen, “Independence as a Social Myth: Disability and the Politics of the Natural”
Nathan Franco, “Lived Gendered Experiences of Adolescents Diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria”
Wenxi Jiang, “Listening Beyond Silence：Nature as an Alternative Archive for Unseen Women”
Bahora Shukurova, “The effects of societal pressure on young girls and women’s mental health in
Uzbekistan, Central Asia”
AB 3103 2B：Bodies and Fetishization
Discussant: Kolleen Guy
Yongkun Wu Vicky, “Writing from the Affective Body: K-Pop Deokjil Literature as Écriture Féminine in
the Mediated Age”
Aspen Dong,” How Pornography Amplifies Fetishization of Asian Women”
Kun Peng ,” Two Threads, One Tale: The Dual Narrative in Bian Er Chai”
Zichen Wu,” Premarital cohabitation and marital quality in China: Do consequences differ by gender?”
AB 3107 2C：Space and Memory
Discussant: Nathan Hauthaler
Zhishen Li Jackson, “Rhapsody in August”
Haiping He, “The Castle-town System (jōkamachi ) in Tokugawa Japan”
Zhiyuan Ma, “Shorelines and the Light of the World: Maritime Space and the Practice of Identity in
Derek Walcott”
17:30 – 18:15 Reception of student publications (Lilypad, Nexus, Humans of DKU)
Water Pavilion
18:30 Gala Dinner
AB Executive Dining Room
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS BIOS
Ásta / Duke University
A native of Iceland, Ásta got her BA in mathematics and philosophy from Brandeis, her AM in philosophy
from Harvard, and PhD in philosophy from MIT. She taught for a number of years at San Francisco State University, but is now Professor of Philosophy at Duke. Her main research interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. For more on her research please go to astaphilosophy.com.
Liangliang Zhang / NYUSH
ZHANG Liangliang is Assistant professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2022, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She also holds an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology (Medical Anthropology Concentration) from Cambridge and a B.A. in International Comparative Studies from Duke University. Liangliang’s research explores the intersection of citizenship, wellbeing, and lived ecology in a globalizing China. Her current book project, Embodying Chinese Citizenship: Self-Transformation and Social Innovation from Rural China, examines personally and socially transformative practices within grassroots education and healing initiatives based in rural China, with an amplifying reach. As an engaged anthropologist and educator, Liangliang is committed to community-engaged, co-creative ethnography and transformative experiential learning, guided by the core ethics of permaculture—earth care, people care, and fair share. Her research, teaching, and activism converge around the central theme of relational regeneration—nurturing generative connections with the self, other beings, and the Living Earth.
KEYNOTE SPEECH ABSTRACTS
Ásta
Social Construction
We hear and see claims in public discourse and on social media, as well as in academic writing, that this or that or the other is social constructed. But what does that mean? And what is the point of making such claims? I present an overview of social construction and then introduce a certain conception of social construction that I use to make sense of social categories like genders, sexes, and races and the idea that phenomena such as gender and disability is socially constructed, as opposed to natural.
Liangliang Zhang
Re-Storying Ecology: Regenerative Education and Ecological Care from Rural China
This keynote introduces the theoretical foundations and practical work of the Inclusive Ecology Collective (IEC), a living laboratory at NYU Shanghai where storytelling, ecology, and community engagement converge to reimagine education as a regenerative force. Nested within the NYU global network and evolved in partnership with pioneering grassroots communities in ecological farming, rural community revitalization, and art education, the Collective experiments with place-based forms of learning and care rooted in everyday ecological practice and local cultural life.
Through initiatives such as the Re-Storying Futures Intercultural Regenerative Education Fellowship, alongside intergenerational courses, workshops, and community-based collaborations, the Collective seeks to reconnect young people with land, tradition, and shared creative practice. Drawing on forms of indigenous, relational ontologies that understand humans, more-than-human worlds, and ancestors as profoundly entangled, this work challenges individualizing, competition-oriented models of education and human development. In their place, it explores community-grounded, relationally-shaped, and ecologically embedded approaches to youth and community flourishing.
By foregrounding rural China as a site of pedagogical and ecologically-oriented social innovation rather than vacuum, this presentation argues that regenerative education from rural China can offer vital resources for rethinking care, resilience, and collective flourishing in a time of social and ecological crisis.
Keywords: regenerative education, ecological care, youth flourishing, relational wellbeing, rural China
Student Presentation Abstracts
1A： Food and Consumption
Kymbat Altybay
The Power of Apricots: Nature, Borders, and Human Mobility in the Fergana Valley
In the disputed border regions of the Fergana Valley, where the territories of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan overlap, one fruit determines the fate of thousands of people. This paper will explore the apricot tree (Prunus armeniaca) as an active participant in the complex processes of nature and politics in the Isfara River basin. Based on the recent ethnographic findings of Asel Murzakulova on “the power of apricot,” this research will analyse how the life cycle of this non-human agent significantly influences human behavior and cross-border relations.
The paper argues that the cultivation of apricots is an important force in three different realms. Firstly, the cycles of production of the fruit have a direct impact on the distribution of family labor as well as migration patterns. For example, the successful harvest of the fruit may delay the departure of the son to Russia, while the unsuccessful harvest due to disease or frost may accelerate the outmigration process. Thus, the fate of the human is tied to the health of the trees. Secondly, the bazaars for dried apricots that exist between countries have their own economic temporality as well as logic in places such as Surkh (Tajikistan) and Kara-Bak (Kyrgyzstan). For example, the vendors are able to cross ethnic boundaries as well as use both national currencies, while the border guards fight each other in the hills above. During the forty days of Saratan, when the water is most important for the survival of the trees as well as the farmers, the shared dependence on the trees may catalyze acts of solidarity between the water masters across the borders that the states militarize.
In shifting the focus from the nation-state to the apricot tree, paper shows that the framework of the environmental humanities can also shed light on the ways in which communities deal with border conflicts, land shortages, and economic uncertainty. The apricot, the paper argues, is one that offers hope and cooperation in a conflict region.
Marielle Williamson
The power of your sip–how daily choices
Addressing the climate crisis requires systemic change within large institutions, where routine consumption choices collectively shape environmental outcomes at scale. Universities are both knowledge producers and operational actors, uniquely positioning them to model evidence-based interventions that align research with practice. This report analyzes a three-week oat milk default trial conducted at Nevermind Café at DKU from November 16 to December 3, examining how institutional choice architecture can drive measurable environmental impact with minimal cost. This student-led initiative promoted oat milk through menu placement, campus-wide media outreach, and a temporary price incentive, drawing on existing research (including Duke-affiliated studies) demonstrating the disproportionate climate footprint of dairy relative to plant-based alternatives.
Using café sales data and standardized environmental impact metrics from Our World in Data and Poore and Nemecek (2018), the study compares oat milk consumption during the trial to baseline levels. Results indicate a 140% increase in oat milk purchases, displacing approximately 70.2 liters of dairy milk in three weeks. This substitution resulted in estimated savings of over 70,000 liters of water, 172 kilograms of CO₂ emissions, and 570 square meters of land use. These findings align with outcomes reported by peer institutions—including Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, and UCLA—that have adopted oat milk defaults amid growing global awareness of food systems’ role in climate mitigation. Factors like cost analysis, long term timeline, and cultural context are also explored within the study. The overall results demonstrate that small, strategic institutional changes can yield outsized environmental benefits, supporting the urgent need for universities to transition from individual-level sustainability messaging toward structural, research-backed reforms embedded in everyday life.
Felipe Rebello Silvestri
Carne, Capital, and Cross-Continental Ties: An Ethnographic Study of Industrial Meat
How can the study of industrial meat production help us understand contemporary Brazil-China relations and political economy? This paper argues that the Brazil-China beef corridor functions as a paradigmatic neo-extractivist arrangement. While diplomatic discourse emphasizes a “win-win” strategic partnership , the material reality depends on an unequal ecological exchange that externalizes socio-environmental costs to Brazil while China centralizes regulatory power and food security gains.
Grounded in fieldwork interviews conducted with industry actors and a Brazilian meat-exporting firm , this study utilizes the theoretical lenses of world-ecology and the politics of operations to unpack the commodity chain. I demonstrate that the trade is governed by a “dictatorship of price and scale” : Brazil’s competitive edge is rooted in large-scale production costs that dwarf fragmented Chinese domestic farming. This scale allows the Chinese state to satisfy the “Cheap Food” pillar of Moore’s world-ecology , ensuring political legitimacy through affordable protein for a growing middle class.
The research reveals that the market is structured not by consumer preference, but by the unilateral regulatory authority in China. These “black-boxed” operations are managed by specialized corporate teams navigating a complex interface between state agencies and global standards. The 2026 safeguard measures, which imposed a 30% reduction in Brazilian beef quotas , illustrate an asymmetric vulnerability: China retains the sovereign power to reorganize the chain abruptly, forcing Brazilian producers to absorb the fiscal and territorial risks.
Ultimately, the meat on plates across China is a “geopolitical artifact of an unequal ecological exchange”. By “filling in the ellipses” between Brazilian pastures and Chinese consumers , this project exposes how this South-South relationship reproduces extractivist logics, rendering environmental degradation in the periphery invisible to the center.”
1B：Art and Sustainability
Trang Ta Annie
The Critical Periphery: How the West, Not Southeast Asia, Shape China’s Rare Earth Vulnerability
The conventional wisdom, rooted in Weaponized Interdependence theory, holds that central nodes in global supply chains are largely invulnerable to peripheral pressure. I challenge this assumption through a mixed-method analysis of China’s rare earth network. Calculating an External Vulnerability Index, I find that while China’s overall vulnerability is low, it exhibits two specific weaknesses: dependency on Australian raw materials and a competitiveness threat from cheaper U.S. compounds. Qualitative analysis not only confirms this but also excludes Southeast Asian states as sources of China’s vulnerability. The findings refine Weaponized Interdependence theory by demonstrating that a subset of peripheral states can impose costs on the central state.
Byerikbol Yerbol
Engineering nature’s resilience: A literature review on Self-Healing Soft Materials for a Sustainable Society
Nature’s resilience offers a compelling model for addressing the growing crisis of electronic and material waste. Biological systems possess an inherent capacity to self-heal, repairing damage and extending functional life. This principle has inspired the development of self-healing soft materials that are capable of autonomously repairing cuts and punctures through reversible chemical bonds such as Diels-Alder reaction. This research investigates current capabilities and applications, particularly in soft robotics– biomedical implants and consumer goods– while identifying gaps between laboratory innovation and commercial deployment.
The methodology integrates three approaches: a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature and technical reports to map the current landscape of self-healing materials; exploratory use of AI-assisted simulations to model material behavior and generate preliminary insights that could guide future experimental work; and critical analysis of environmental regulations governing soft materials and more, which identifies inadequacies, such as the export loophole in the EU’s WEEE Directive and the absence of enforceable end-of-life protocols that hinder adoption of sustainable alternatives.
Long-term, this research will inform the author about the development of a novel in-situ characterization tool capable of addressing some of the current challenges, such as soft sample gripping and real-time healing observation. Such instruments and machines are essential because they provide the empirical bridge between theoretical prediction and observed reality. The ability to accurately measure healing processes as they occur is fundamental to validating material designs and deepening the understanding of how synthetic systems can truly mimic nature’s resilient designs. Humankind’s capacity to build a sustainable future depends fundamentally on this ability to observe, measure, and ultimately replicate nature’s own solutions.
Ermina Kuzerbayeva
Ecocinema in Central Asia: Environmental Storytelling in Kazakh and Kyrgyz Film
Central Asian cinema offers one of the most compelling yet understudied archives of environmental storytelling in the post-Soviet world. This paper examines how contemporary Kazakh and Kyrgyz filmmakers use cinematic form to narrate ecological precarity, human–nature entanglements, and the cultural transformations unfolding across the steppe and mountain regions.
Focusing on films such as Tulpan (Sergei Dvortsevoy), Beshkempir (Aktan Arym Kubat), and The Horse Thieves: Roads of Time (Yerlan Nurmukhambetov and Lisa Takeba), the project argues that these works constitute a distinct mode of ecocinema—one that departs from Western environmental film traditions by foregrounding nomadic cosmologies, rural lifeworlds, and the quiet violence of environmental change.
1C：Craft and Visualit
Le Yen Vy
Adapting Without Disappearing – Does Market Integration Erode or Enable Authenticity of Craftsmanship in Vietnam
Traditional crafts in Vietnam are currently shaped by market integration and modernization, through channels of tourism and market demand, raising concerns about the erosion of authenticity. This study examines the true effect of market integration, whether it erodes or reshapes craftsmanship, arguing that it can produce positive outcomes and enhance adaptability. By employing the method of fieldwork-based and qualitative methodology: interviews and participant observation in Hue, Vietnam, this study focuses only on three key crafts for structural insights. One month of staying with and experiencing the life and work of these craftsmen reveals the perspective and motives for the selective preservation of techniques.
The stories told by the community also reflect the role of intermediaries after market integration started by the end of the 20th century. The argument aims to explain the negotiation of authenticity under the comparative scope of origin, morality, and function through the analysis of interviews with the craftsmen. This study contributes to the existing field of cultural policy by adding craftsmen’s voices and their agency, which is often overlooked by other studies.
Mary Mulualem
Imagined, Based in Truth: Zoomorphic Imagery in Bronze Age China and Premodern Chinese Culture
This paper will explore the zoomorphic imagery consisting of mythical or composite hybrid species found on Bronze Age Chinese artifacts from 2000-771 BCE, encompassing societies including the Shang and Zhou dynasties as well as the Erligang 二里岗文化. It will synthesize how and why the presence of specifically imaginary animals among zoomorphic imagery in Bronze Age China was so culturally significant in their time. Namely, deducing the links to a belief in a supernatural world, spiritual connections with the non-living higher powers and a possible belief in an opposition between civil and uncivilized worlds. Zoomorphic imagery is seldom met with surprised reactions from art historians.
That artists, from ancient, premodern and modern eras alike, incorporate beings from the environment that surrounds them into their craft only makes sense. Factoring in societal and cultural norms and practices that vary between regions and populations, the idea that artists should use animals to enhance their art seems intrinsic. Scholars have been hard pressed to interpret zoomorphic imagery that does not quite reflect their natural surroundings. Focusing in on premodern China, the Bronze Age especially produced a fascinating collection of art containing unique imaginary animals.
Ruixiang Hu
Architecture of Complicity: The Intruder, the Spectator, and the Ethics of Seeing in Haneke’s Cinema
This paper examines how Michael Haneke’s cinema implicates the spectator in the violence it depicts. Through close readings of Benny’s Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997), it argues that Haneke uses visual tactics—recorded and replayed footage, the direct camera address, the formal refusal of psychological depth, etc.—to transform spectatorship into a question of moral accountability. In both films, the bourgeois domestic space is disrupted by an intruding figure whose violence is rendered not as dramatic spectacle but as something the viewer is made to watch, confirm, and ultimately share responsibility for. Drawing upon Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, the paper contends that Haneke’s formal choices expose how mediated images desensitize and distance, turning persons into reproducible signs. The result is a cinema that does not merely depict ethical collapse but stages it: the screen becomes no longer a window, but a mirror in which the spectator must confront their own complicity in the violence happening before them. The paper concludes by asking what political and ethical demands Haneke’s visuality places on contemporary audiences
2A：Gender and Disability
Zhuo’er Chen
Independence as a Social Myth: Disability and the Politics of the Natural
In modern social and political life, disability is often read against an unspoken norm of independence. Independence is treated as a sign of full personhood; it is recognized in the capacity to move through space without assistance, manage oneself in institutionally legible ways, and make decisions in forms that count as competent. By contrast, dependence is often treated as reduced agency and attached to disability as a defining trait.
This paper argues that “independence” functions as a social myth: a historically produced ideal treated as natural and morally superior. Using disability as an analytic lens, it examines how this ideal is made to appear self-evident in social and political life. In doing so, the paper shows that what appears as independence is sustained by social relations, care labor, and support systems that are backgrounded. It therefore reframes dependence as a social condition whose visibility is unevenly distributed and whose stigma is disproportionately attached to disability.
This is a conceptual and interpretive paper. This paper develops its argument through critical engagement with foundational theoretical work in contemporary disability philosophy. It draws on Eva Kittay’s philosophical analysis of dependency and care, which reframes dependency as an inevitable and ethically significant aspect of human life. It also incorporates key concepts from Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s concept of “misfit”, which reconceptualizes disability as arising from the interaction between embodied particularities and environments designed around the presumed normate body.
On this basis, the paper clarifies how the myth of independence is stabilized. While prompting a rethinking of what is considered “natural”, the contribution is to shift the question from who “lacks” independence to how dependence is socially organized and should become politically recognized.
Keywords: disability; independence; dependence; normalcy; personhood
Nathan Franco
Lived Gendered Experiences of Adolescents Diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria
This study proposal uses a developmental, sociocultural framework that examines how childhood “gendered” participation and microsystem-based meaning making shape retrospective understanding of gender-related distress among adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria. By utilizing semi-structure life history and child rearing life history interviews the proposed study investigates the mechanisms behind how encouraged and discouraged participatory activities and interpretations connect to “turning points” that lead to gender dysphoria diagnosis. The turning points can be categorized as moments of increased distress, moments of awareness, and social feedback interpretive meaning making.
The study’s proposed model conceptualizes gender dysphoria as emerging through a continuous process of participation, interpterion, and re-interpretation rather than attributing causality to parenting methods or peer-based alignment. Caregivers are framed as contributors to the meaning making process spanning childhood into adolescents. The study anticipates to find that through repeated routine the child learns certain preferences that are socially marked to belonging as a particular trait for a certain gender category.
Overtime this routine of meaning-making can contribute to future diagnosis of gender dysphoria in adolescents as distress forms through potential pubic development, anxiety about social belonging, role incompatibility, and concerns regarding future social legitimacy. By using encouraged and discouraged participation as a gateway to understanding gender dysphoria diagnosis in adolescents, this study advocates for future interventions that focus on the lived experience of adolescents rather than just the clinical outcome.
Wenxi Jiang
Listening Beyond Silence：Nature as an Alternative Archive for Unseen Women
This paper argues that Michae Recent developments in botany show that plants could scream when they are distressed or unhealthy, suggesting that perceived botanical “silence” reflects the limits of human sensory and interpretive systems. This insight provides a productive framework for feminist historiography, where women’s intellectual labor and lived experiences have often been unseen. Drawing on the field of feminist botany, this paper explores how nature could be reframed as an alternative archive for women excluded from scientific authorship. The paper also argues that epistemic absence frequently results from structural deafness.
Theoretically, the paper aligns contemporary research on plant sensing with feminist critiques of archival authority to question whose voices are recognized as knowledge.
Methodologically, the research adopts a practice-led approach in which the academic paper and the author’s experimental film, The Tale of a Rose, together constitute the research output. The film functions as a research site, advancing a “sensory hypothesis” that positions experimental moving-image practices as translational media capable of making non-human records perceptible, opening alternative ways of engaging with memory and history beyond conventional archives.
Bahora Shukurova
The effects of societal pressure on young girls and women’s mental health in Uzbekistan, Central Asia
In Uzbekistan, deeply rooted gender norms surrounding marriage, education, and family roles exert significant pressure on young girls and women, with measurable consequences for mental health and well-being. This study examines how societal expectations—particularly those related to early marriage, educational limitation, and restricted autonomy—shape psychological outcomes among young women in Central Asia.
Using a mixed-methods approach, the research analyzes 45 anonymous survey responses (25 in English, 20 in Uzbek) collected from girls and women primarily aged 14–24. Quantitative findings indicate that 84% of English-language respondents and 75% of Uzbek-language respondents perceive strong societal pressure on young women, with a majority linking this pressure to stress, anxiety, and diminished self-esteem. Thematic analysis of open-ended responses identifies marriage expectations and educational restrictions as the most pervasive sources of psychological strain. Respondents describe being discouraged from pursuing higher education, pressured into early marriage, and evaluated primarily through traditional gender roles.
At the same time, the findings demonstrate that family support functions as a critical protective factor. Women who report strong familial encouragement exhibit greater resilience and reduced internalization of societal pressure. The study argues that the mental health challenges faced by young women in Uzbekistan are not individual vulnerabilities but structural consequences of gendered social norms. Addressing these outcomes, therefore, requires not only expanded mental health services but also broader cultural and familial shifts that redefine women’s roles beyond marriage and domesticity.
2B：Bodies and Fetishization
Yongkun Wu Vicky
Writing from the Affective Body: K-Pop Deokjil Literature as Écriture Féminine in the Mediated Age
K-pop deokjil literature describes an underrepresented mode of writing that emerges from women fans’ embodied, affective engagement in K-pop fandom activities. This nascent genre critically challenges the enduring stigmatization of fangirling by legitimizing fangirls’ bodily intensities as a crucial way of inhabiting contemporary life.
This paper offers close readings of Lee Heejoo’s Phantom Limb Pain (2016) and Yoon Hye Eun’s Anyways, Idol (2021) to reveal how such feminine writings reclaim stigmatized fangirling practices. Through the affect theory of entrainment and technological mediation, it draws on French theorist Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine to analyze deokjil writings. Two intersecting themes are explored in detail: (1) writing from the mediated affective body; (2) the poetics of giving and flying in K-pop deokjil. Notably, the close analysis section highlights the role of media technologies in shaping and amplifying fans’ affective participation and feminine expressions. Contextualizing K-pop deokjil literature within the changing dynamics of feminist activism and women’s cultural practices in post-IMF South Korea, this paper underscores its value as an emergent genre that counters entrenched misogyny by reaffirming affective relationality in K-pop fandom.
Aspen Dong
How Pornography Amplifies Fetishization of Asian Women
This paper examines how pornography perpetuates and intensifies the fetishization of Asian women, tracing this phenomenon from historical representations of Asian femininity to its manifestations in contemporary digital culture. Through the cases of figures such as Afong Moy and Ah Yuen, as well as legislative milestones like the Page Act of 1875, the paper articulates a genealogical link between 19th-century sexual exploitation, colonial fantasies, and modern pornographic portrayals of Asian women. Drawing upon historical documentation, media research, and sociological studies, it argues that pornography functions not merely as entertainment but as a cultural mechanism that reinforces racialized gender stereotypes of Asian women as submissive, docile, and sexually available. By situating contemporary consumption of pornographic content within a longer history of sexual objectification and racialized violence, this paper demonstrates that the fetishization of Asian women in pornography contributes to real-world violence, discrimination, and sex-based harm. The analysis underscores the urgent need for critical intervention in media representation, as well as broader social and political efforts to challenge entrenched stereotypes and to promote more ethical, nuanced, and respectful portrayals of Asian women.
Kun Peng
Two Threads, One Tale: The Dual Narrative in Bian Er Chai
This paper examines the narrative structure and affective logic of Bian er chai 弁而釵 (Crown and Hairpin), a late Ming–early Qing collection of homoerotic short stories often read primarily as historical evidence of male same-sex desire (nanfeng). Moving beyond a purely social-historical approach, this study argues that the text’s ideological force lies in its consistent dual-plot narrative structure, through which qing (affection) is hierarchically elevated above social function and normative order.
Across all four volumes, each story pairs a central male–male love plot with a secondary subplot that may involve heterosexual marriage, rival suitors, or failed desire. These paired narratives operate relationally rather than independently: the secondary plots function to define, test, and ultimately magnify the value of qing. In Volumes One and Three, morally compromised or unsuccessful relationships are juxtaposed against virtuous male–male bonds. In Volumes Two and Four, heterosexual marriage is integrated into homoerotic narratives, not as a competing form of intimacy, but as a functional mechanism that fulfills social, familial, and political obligations.
Focusing on “Qingxia ji” 情俠記 (Record of Gallant Affection), this paper demonstrates how heterosexual marriage is depicted as a rationalized alliance based on parity of talent, reproduction, and social order, yet notably devoid of qing. By contrast, male–male relationships are articulated through poetic exchange, emotional reciprocity, and moments in which the male hero willingly relinquishes social dominance and masculine authority for the sake of affective commitment. This structural contrast recasts perfection not as the accumulation of social roles, but as the attainment of affective transcendence.
By foregrounding narrative architecture rather than historical background alone, this paper argues that Bian er chai constructs a hierarchical economy of desire in which qing, rather than gender, sexuality, or social
Zichen Wu
Premarital cohabitation and marital quality in China: Do consequences differ by gender?
Premarital cohabitation has increased rapidly in China following social and economic reforms, yet its implications for marital quality remain debated, particularly outside Western contexts. Using nationally representative data from the 2022 wave of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study examines the association between premarital cohabitation and marital quality among married adults. Guided by selection, causation, and diffusion perspectives, gender-stratified ordinary least squares models are employed to evaluate both cohabitation experience and cohabitation duration.
The results reveal substantial gender heterogeneity. Premarital cohabitation is negatively associated with marital quality among men, while the relationship is not significant among women. Among individuals who cohabited with their spouse prior to marriage, longer cohabitation duration is only positively associated with women’s marital quality. In addition, women’s marital quality is more strongly structured by socioeconomic and life-course factors, including education, income dynamics, and marriage duration. These findings suggest that the diffusion of cohabitation in China remains incomplete and gendered, reflecting the behavior’s interaction with persistent social norms surrounding marriage and family life.”
2C：Space and Memory
Zhishen Li Jackson
Rhapsody in August: A Postcolonial Critique Nostalgia of the Light: The Archaeology and Poetic Reconstruction of Memory
Released in 1991, Akira Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August has sparked ongoing debate. While some consider it an extension of Kurosawa’s humanist vision, others criticize it as concealing Japan’s war crimes in WWII, distorting Japan’s image and positioning Japan as a victim. However, the binary reading of Rhapsody in August does not address what the film delivers. By analyzing the materiality and sound of the film, I argue that the reconciliation achieved between Kane and Clark is not only a symbol of humanism, but a representation of American cultural hegemony and internalized epistemic violence within post-WWII Japan. The paper first analyzes the politics of visuality and materiality. The younger generation wears clothes with American collegiate symbols, representing American cultural domination in the aspect of political economy and epistemology. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the politics of acoustics. The younger generation tries to repair the organ from the Japanese scale to the western harmony scale. By adopting western standard of acoustics, the act of repairing the organ is not only a turn from broken to fixed, but a turn from the pentatonic Japanese scale to Western harmonic scale. However, American hegemony is not absolute; resistance to it manifests in the duality of silence. Kane, the old Japanese grandma, turns the silence of the atomic bombs into an unspoken mutual resistance by Hibakusha, the victims of the atomic bombs. It is through silence that Japanese victims in WWII resist against American hegemony from embodied violence to epistemic violence.
Haiping He
The Castle-town System (jōkamachi ) in Tokugawa Japan
This study proposal uses a developmental, sociocultural framework that examines how childhood “gendered” participation and microsystem-based meaning making shape retrospective understanding of gender-related distress among adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria. By utilizing semi-structure life history and child rearing life history interviews the proposed study investigates the mechanisms behind how encouraged and discouraged participatory activities and interpretations connect to “turning points” that lead to gender dysphoria diagnosis. The turning points can be categorized as moments of increased distress, moments of awareness, and social feedback interpretive meaning making.
The study’s proposed model conceptualizes gender dysphoria as emerging through a continuous process of participation,
interpterion, and re-interpretation rather than attributing causality to parenting methods or peer-based alignment. Caregivers are
framed as contributors to the meaning making process spanning childhood into adolescents. The study anticipates to find that
through repeated routine the child learns certain preferences that are socially marked to belonging as a particular
trait for a certain gender category. Overtime this routine of meaning-making can contribute to future diagnosis of gender
dysphoria in adolescents as distress forms through potential pubic development, anxiety about social belonging, role
incompatibility, and concerns regarding future social legitimacy. By using encouraged and discouraged participation
as a gateway to understanding gender dysphoria diagnosis in adolescents, this study advocates for future interventions that focus on the lived experience of adolescents rather than just the clinical outcome.
Zhiyuan Ma
Shorelines and the Light of the World: Maritime Space and the Practice of Identity in Derek Walcott
This paper argues that in Derek Walcott’s poetry, the sea functions not as a symbol of origin but as a practiced space in which postcolonial identity is continually produced. Situated within the violent history of Atlantic migration and colonial inequality, the Caribbean cannot rely on stable genealogies or recoverable roots. Instead of resolving identity through return to Africa or reconciliation with Europe, Walcott reimagines identity as something enacted within the maritime space shaped by displacement, silence, and uneven inheritance.
Through close readings of A Far Cry from Africa, The Sea Is History, Anadyomene, and The Light of the World, this paper demonstrates how the sea witnesses and stages multiple dimensions of identity formation. In A Far Cry from Africa, the ocean marks the unequal transmission of colonial violence across generations. In The Sea Is History, it becomes a counter-archival space responding to historical erasure, resonating with Saidiya Hartman’s account of the limits of the slave archive. In Anadyomene, the sea is neither origin nor return, but a generative field from which identity emerges，refusing the logic of purity or singular belonging. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practice, the paper reads Walcott’s repeated invocation of the sea as a performative act that produces historical space rather than merely describing it. Engaging Patrick Manning’s concept of diaspora as long-term historical structure, Clare Anderson’s analysis of maritime mobility as imperial network, and James Dator’s understanding of maritime continuity across migrants and runaways, the paper situates Walcott’s poetics within broader histories of oceanic movement. Finally, by analyzing naming and illumination in The Light of the World, the paper argues that identity emerges not from origin but from ongoing spatial practice along the unfinished Caribbean shoreline.
PARTICIPATING FACULTY BIOS
Carlos rojas / Duke
Carlos rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image, and his research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies. Dr. Carlos Rojas is a Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as a Professor in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000 and completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in 1995.
Selina Lai-Henderson / DKU
Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson is an Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University and co-director of the Humanities Research Center. She is the author of Mark Twain in China and has published widely in leading journals and edit ed volumes in the field of transnational American Studies. Her PMLA essay, “‘You Are No Darker Than I Am:’ The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China,” is the recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature in the tenured category. Dr. Lai-Henderson is the book review editor of American Quarterly, and was chair and co-chair of American Studies Association’s International Committee. She was the 2024-25 Hutchins Family Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She has also served on the jury of the 2025 ACLS open access book prize in literary studies. She holds degrees from HKU and Heidelberg University, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford.
Nathan Hauthaler/DKU
His research focuses on the nature of human agency and action, which he investigates from various systematic and hist
orical vantage points including the philosophy of action, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics; the history of analytic philosophy, especially Anscombe; classical Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle; and classical Chinese philosophy. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan span a broad range of subjects including the theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, introduction to Western philosophy, and history of modern European philosophy.
He is the author of essays on the philosophy of action, epistemology, the history of philosophy, and public international law. He is working on a number of essays on the nature of intentional action and its connection to practical capacity and knowledge. For more information visit https://nathauthaler.net
Hauthaler has a Mag. phil. in philosophy and a Mag. iur. in law from the University of Graz, Austria, an M.Phil. Student in philosophy from the University of London, Birkbeck, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University.
Erin Wilkerson / DKU
American guerilla gardener turned guerilla filmmaker and visual artist, Erin Wilkerson, is the co-founder of the political art collective and production company, Creative Agitation along with her partner, Travis Wilkerson. They have exhibited in the Veni
ce Biennale, Locarno Film Festival, the Viennale, and the Berlinale, and their film, “Nuclear Family (2021)” was awarded Mencion Especial at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, screened in 20+ festivals, and is distributed by Arsenal (Berlin). Grounded in ecology thanks to her early professional work in landscape architecture, her solo practice is rooted in the exploration of global narratives. Her international exhibitions include, The Second Burial (2023), which streamed on MUBI Latin America. She has also exhibited at Prismatic Ground (New York), FICUNAM (Mexico), Arica Docs (Chile), and INTERSECCION (Spain). After receiving a PhD in Research and Practice from Liverpool John Moores University, in partnership with the TransArt Institute, comprised of an intensive theoretical investigation of “Invasive Species” as a study of feral filmmaking as decolonial practice, and an accompanying speculative fiction film, “Strange Flower (little sister to the poor)” about a witch navigating colonial history on the border of Europe with the east, she was awarded Global Fellow at Duke Kunshan University.
Adrien Mbar Pouille
Adrien Pouille’s research focuses on French-speaking or Francophone artists’ relationships with narrative genres, especially novels and films. He studies their endeavors to express hybrid worldviews and paradigms through multivocal and multimoda
l texts.
He has taken part in several collaborative research projects and publications among which African Cultural Production & the Rhetoric of Humanism (Lexington Books, 2020), and A Saafi-Saafi & English/French Dictionary (Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2016).
His papers “Ambivalent Relation with the Divine in Wole Soyinka’s The Road” and “A Philosophical, Cultural and Literary Critique of Mental Illness in Birago Diop’s Sarzan” were respectively published by Ufahamu in 2016 and The African Journal of Religion, Philosophy and Culture in 2021. He is also the author of Human Journeys and the Quest for Knowledge in African Writing (Academica Press, 2021).
Pouille graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and two Ph.D. certificates in African studies and global studies. Before joining DKU, Pouille taught at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as a French teaching assistant, Indiana University Bloomington as an associate instructor, and Wabash College as a visiting assistant professor of French.
Renee Richer / DKU
Her work is at the intersection of environment and biology (particularly physiological ecology) with emphasis on extreme environments. She has worked extensively with plants, animals and microbial communities, focusing on semi-arid to hyper-arid enviro
nments. For more than a decade, she has been working to understand the physiology and ecology of complex biocrusts in deserts and the bioactive compounds they produce. She is particularly interested in how environmental factors influence compound production and isomer ratios. Her teaching includes Global Challenges in Science, Technology and Health and Ecophysiology.
She has recently published a guide to the flora of Qatar (Akkadia Press). She served as guest editor for a Journal of Arid Environments special issue, Toxins in Desert Environments, and has published numerous peer-reviewed papers. She is co-chair of the Applied Ecology section and certified senior ecologist of the Ecological Society of America.
Andrew Thomas Wortham / DKU
His research focuses on the political organizing of LGBT groups in Yunnan, China as they cooperate with the local gover
nment to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include Sociology of Gender; Medical Anthropology; China Studies; and NGO Studies. Wortham has notable publications in the journals of Medical Anthropology, Journal of Contemporary China and Asian Studies Review. He is currently working on his book, Queer Collusion: HIV Quotas and LGBT Politics in Yunnan, China. He is also the Secretary of the Association of Queer Anthropology.
Wortham has a B.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Texas Austin (2012) and an M.A. (2018) and Ph.D. (2021) in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University Shanghai (2022-2024) and the University of Nottingham Ningbo (2021) and taught at Kunming University of Science and Technology (2021-2022). Before beginning his Ph.D. he was a fellow with Teach for China (2013-2015).
Kolleen Guy
Kolleen M. Guy is a historian of transnational culture whose research examines how ideas, commodities, and displaced communities move across borders to create new forms of identity and belonging. Her scholarship spans global food history, wine studies, and the history of human rights and statelessness. She is the co-editor of Statelessness after Arendt: European Refugees in China and the Pacific in the Second World War （2025）, which extends Hannah Arendt’s insights by illuminating the global dimensions of statelessness and the emotional and political strategies refugees forged in Asia and the Pacific. Her award-winning book When Champagne Became French established her early contributions to food and identity studies, and her current monograph,“The Taste of Landscape: Food and the Meaning of Place in Global Markets,” traces how terroir evolved from a French cultural idiom into a global framework shaping food regulation, authenticity, and environmental governance. Together with her other manuscript project,“The Parapolitics of Empathy,” these works reflect her commitment to understanding how cultural practices, moral concepts, and material landscapes shape memory, community, and global interconnection.
Guy’s teaching philosophy is grounded in the conviction that rigorous scholarship and transformative pedagogy are mutually reinforcing. She teaches widely in transnational history, including courses on refugees and statelessness, historical methods, global food systems, and the cultural representation of war.
Her classes emphasize inquiry-driven learning, close engagement with archives and material culture, reflective writing, and experiential fieldwork in museums and memory sites. Drawing directly from her research, she guides students in examining how historical narratives are constructed, how communities respond to rupture, and how ethical and political ideas take shape across borders. Known for her mentorship and interdisciplinary teaching, she inspires students to become analytical thinkers and globally engaged scholars.
Guy received her Ph.D. in History from Indiana University Bloomington. She earned her M.A. in History from Northern Illinois University in 1989 and her B.A. in History and English from North Central College in 1985. Before joining Duke Kunshan University, she served for over two decades on the faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she held the Ricardo Romo Distinguished Professorship in the Honors College.
Hwa Yeong Wang 
Wang’s research interests include Asian and comparative philosophy, feminist philosophy and Confucian philosophy with a special focus on women, gender and ritual. Her recent publication includes “Chastity as a Virtue: Song Siyeol and Hume” (Religions, 2020) and “Women Who Know Ritual” (Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2022). Her first translation of and commentary on the writings of two Korean women philosophers is in press with Oxford University Press with the title “Korean Women Philosophers and the Ideal of a Female Sage: The Essential Writings of Im Yunjidang and Gang Jeongildang” (July 2023).
Wang has a. B.A. in Confucian philosophy, an M.A. in Confucian studies at Sungkyunkwan University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy (philosophy, interpretation and culture program), an interdisciplinary program from Binghamton University (State University of New York). She served as a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University 2020-2022 and Emory University 2022-2023.
Seth Henderson 
Henderson’s film practice and research are rooted in the complex relationship between local traditions and global phenomena. In particular, he is interested in exploring the interplay of context, film texts, and formal innovation within East Asian histories. At Duke Kunshan, his teaching interests range from Cinematography, Audio Documentary, and Screenwriting courses to Film Studies, and the Art of Interpretation: Images and Sound courses. He is an active member of the DKU Cinematic Futures filmmaking laboratory and is the co-founder and co-advisor of the student-led DKU Film Society.
He is an award-winning filmmaker with over twenty years of professional experience in fiction, non-fiction, and art installations and performances spanning the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. His documentary films have been recognized by several international film awards and have been shown on PBS in the US. Henderson has sold two feature-length screenplays to production companies. His academic publications include ‘Colony in Crisis’ in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (2024), and ‘Berita Singapura (1963-9) and Hong Kong Today (1967-73)’, a co-authored chapter in The British Official Film in South-East Asia: Malaya / Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong (2016). He has been a member of The D-Word society of documentary professionals, since 2018.
Henderson holds a PhD in Film Studies (documentary film in Hong Kong) and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in filmmaking.
