9 April 2018

The Social Credit System: A New Mode of Governance in China?

On April 9, Dr. Séverine Arsène, Managing Editor of AsiaGlobal Online at Asia Global Institute, The University of Hong Kong, came to talk about the role that the internet plays in the Chinese government's strategy to acquire "great power" status. She discussed the significance of the plan to develop a Social Credit System, an ambitious attempt to harness big data and artificial intelligence that has the publicized goal of enhancing trust in society, but which also indicates a dramatic and, to some, worrying increase in state surveillance. Dr. Arsene also analyzed the type of governance that is promoted through such a system and extended her discussion to various social credit instruments developed by corporations such as Alibaba and Tencent.

18 April 2018

Press Articles and Collective Memories: Chinese Women in 1950 (報刊文獻與民間記憶：1950年的中國婦女)

Dr. Liu Xiaoli, Manager and Researcher at the Center for Women's Studies, Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences, gave a talk on April 18 to explore how, starting from 1950, the livelihood of Chinese women was interlocked with China's New Democratic Revolution and the development of Socialism. In the talk, based on textual analysis and fieldwork research, she connected important political events such as the legislation of the Marriage Law, the Anti-Illiteracy Movement and land reform to the process of women's liberation.

16 April 2018

The New Childhood Studies: Reflections on Some Recent Collaborations between Anthropologists and Psychologists

Prof. Alma Gottlieb, Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered a talk on April 16. Juxtaposing the study of early childhood in the fields of anthropology and psychology, which each criticize the other's assumptions, she highlighted some recent ongoing collaborative work that shows great promise for how the classic anthropological focus on the local, the social, the historical, and the political might engage with the classic psychological focus on the individual, the universal, the cerebral, and the emotional.

19 April 2018

IT Phone Home: Tracing the Strange Itinerary of Corporate Social Responsibility in China

On April 19, Prof. Ellen Hertz, of the Institut d'ethnologie, Université de Neuchâtel, zoomed in on a project that facilitates communication between 'left-behind children' in the countryside and their parents working in factories in China's coastal cities as an example of the new corporate social responsibility paradigm in China that focuses on "capacity building". Describing her 2013 journey with the Chinese NGO that designed the project, she spoke on how it provided a perspective into some of the stakes behind and effects of these novel forms of governmentality.