Graduate Student Research Workshop Series: Work In Progress
Work In Progress is a mini conference sponsored by the Department of East Asian Studies Graduate Program to provide graduate students the opportunity to present their current research questions and findings to a group of their peers.
Our Presenters:
Kyle Nowak: Negotiating Utopia: Queering Space in East Asia
The research presented will be a broad entrance into the production of queer space in East Asia. Aside from the obvious features often associated with queer spaces/districts (availability, convenience, seclusion) how and why are particular architectures chosen, used, renovated, and negotiated for non-normative activity and subjectivity? Through the architectures of Taipei’s New Park, Pojangmacha, and Yokocho, I will quickly explore the overlapping epistemological, semiotic, and theoretical frameworks that work in tandem to produce what we have come to understand as queer space.
Peter Yoon: Secular Modernity in Korea and the Global Imaginary
This paper seeks to examine the ways in which Christianity, as the religion of Western imperial powers, has played an integral role in the modernization of Korea. I will examine in detail some of the excerpts from Yun Ch’iho’s diaries, a pious liberal protestant/bourgeois who supported and worked to realize this figure of free laborer in modern Korea by dedicating himself to the agenda of uprooting the Confucian traditionalism and in turn establishing civic and religious organizations that would help cultivate a public consciousness among the Koreans.
April 14th from 3-5pm.
Location: Bobst LL139
Take home food will be provided.