The Citizenship Lab of the Humanities Research Center presents Manuscript Workshop: “Becoming Environmental Citizens: The Transformative Potentials of Citizen Science in China”
Project title: The Forgotten Romance: An Art and Social History Study on Chinese Peasant Painting of 1950-70s
Project summary:
Chinese Peasant Painting was a major art movement in China active from 1950s to the late 1970s. It was the first time for Chinese peasants to engage in official art creation, which had long been reserved for the intellectual class. By examining the origin of a Chinese peasant painting, Chinese peasant paintings’ visual elements, and the movement’s interaction with socialist art trends in the mid-twentieth century, I argue that the Chinese peasant painting movement was a continuation and development of the mass movement since the founding of New China. Continue reading “Student Research Project: “The Forgotten Romance: An Art and Social History Study on Chinese Peasant Painting of 1950-70s””
HRC is proud to announce a new special issue from Positions, which came out of an HRC sponsored workshop.
Issue editors: Nellie Chu – Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) Mengqi Wang – Assistant Professor of Anthropology at DKU Ralph Litzinger – Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University Qian Zhu – Assistant Professor of History at DKU
Project title: The Feminine Fabulation: An Interdisciplinary Reading of Female K-Pop Idols’ Star Texts
Project summary: This project presents an interdisciplinary examination of the complex and in-depth dimensions of society manifested in visual and entertainment culture by focusing on female K-Pop idols’ star texts in the globalization era. It shall revisit the potential of feminine qualities through female idols’ embodied dialogues with particular social and cultural ideologies. Ultimately, the findings on these postmodern star texts will be approached as fabulations that bring together “archaic and contemporary, as well as documentary and fictional” to produce collective storytelling, and in turn, contributes to “the making of a people” (Chow 2007, pp.25). Continue reading “Student Research Project: Meixuan Wang’s “The Feminine Fabulation: An Interdisciplinary Reading of Female K-Pop Idols’ Star Texts””
Project title: My Great Grandmother, My Grand Aunt, My Grandmother, My Mother and I: A Family Album
Project summary: Shuyuan’s signature work will be an exploration of female intergenerational relations in a patriarchal context. By using photography as her main artistic medium, she draws from her own and her family’s experiences to present a personal, first-person perspective on social issues related to gender and generation in China over the last century. The long-term goal of this project is to use art to focus on intergenerational relationships of women in a patriarchal setting. By focusing on her own past and complex family structure, she hopes that her artworks will interact with the static patriarchal art world and draw the viewer’s attention to two long-neglected social issues: aberrant gender inequality and intergenerational relationships in Chinese society. Continue reading “Student Research Project: Shuyuan Zhou’s “My Great Grandmother, My Grand Aunt, My Grandmother, My Mother and I: A Family Album””
REIKA SHIMOMURA Supported by Professor Daniel Weissglass
Project title: College Students’ Perception of COVID-19 Emergency Response on Campus – Delphi Study on Duke Kunshan University Students Class of 2022 to 2025
Project title: Exploring attentional biases towards foreigners’ facial expressions of pain in Chinese observers
Project summary: Facial expression is a dominant nonverbal channel for pain communication that is often incorporated in clinical pain assessment. Given the importance of nonverbal communication between foreign patients and doctors, understanding the role of sufferers’ race is of great significance. Essentially, prior to recognize and assess pain-related facial expressions, observers will first allocate their attention to the faces. The study aims to examine Chinese observers’ attentional bias on pain-related facial expressions of foreigners from multiple racial backgrounds by tracking the eye-gaze, skin conductance, and behavioral reaction time. Continue reading “Student Research Project: Zhiyuan (Zack) Liu’s “Exploring attentional biases towards foreigners’ facial expressions of pain in Chinese observers””
Project title:
Herb and Beauty: Aromatic Female in “Dream of the Red Chamber”
Project summary: Through a close reading of the poems and descriptions of Daguan Yuan’s female in Dream of the Red Chamber, I mainly explore two questions in this project: How does herb in Dream of the Red Chamber construct female identity? How does the nature-female correlation narrative style embody the feminine space and feminine discourse in the book? Theories related to sensory experiences, eco-feminism, and traditional Chinese medicine will also be referred in the project. Continue reading “Student Research Project: Weiran Li’s “Herb and Beauty: Aromatic Female in ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’””
Congratulations to Rasoul Namazi, Assistant Professor of Political Theory, on his new book, “Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought,” published by Cambridge University Press.
Description: “In this book, Rasoul Namazi offers the first in-depth study of Leo Strauss’ writings on Islamic political thought, a topic that interested Strauss over the course of his career. Namazi’s volume focuses on several important studies by Strauss on Islamic thought. He critically analyzes Strauss’s notes on Averroes’ commentary on Plato’s Republic and also proposes an interpretation of Strauss’ theologico-political notes on the Arabian Nights. Namazi also interprets Strauss’ essay on Alfarabi’s enigmatic treatise, The Philosophy of Plato and provides a detailed commentary on his complex essay devoted to Alfarabi’s summary of Plato’s Laws. Based on previously unpublished material from Strauss’ papers, Namazi’s volume provides new insights into Strauss’ reflections on religion, philosophy, and politics, and their relationship to wisdom, persecution, divine law, and unbelief in the works of key Muslim thinkers. His work presents Strauss as one of the most innovative historians and scholars of Islamic thought.”
The book is available on different platforms including Amazon but if ordered from the Cambridge website, one can get 20% off by entering the code NAMAZI22 at the checkout.
Join HRC Anthropocene XR Lab in our online workshop [Basic VR Interactions], #4 of the XR workshop, seminar, and hackathon series! The keynote speaker Tony Ren, Data Science major from the class of 2023, will introduce the basics of setting up VR devices and designing some of the fundamental VR interactions such as teleporting and grabbing.