Time: 12.30-1.30 pm, Monday 25 August
Venue: Humanities Conference Room, top floor AD Hope Building
Topic: The Journey to Yunfest: The Road that has led Chinese Filmmakers to Personal Documentary Making
Speaker:Yang Kun
Lecturer in Visual Culture, Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming
Visiting Fellow, Research School of Humanities, CASS
In this presentation I will profile Chinese documentary filmmaking over the past half-century since the 1950s. In the decades following the founding of the new republic in 1949, filmmakers were employed in state-run “scientific documentary film” projects. However, in the 1990s filmmakers working at state-run broadcasters launched the Chinese New Documentary Movement. While they were employed inside the system, they began making documentary films outside that status. In the new century more and more independent documentaries have appeared on the horizon of Chinese filmmaking, and some independent film festivals have hit the road to showcase documentaries for the general public. Among these newly born independent film festivals, the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest) is regarded as a homeland for Chinese documentary filmmakers and not just a festival of screening films. With the help of video clips I will document the history of documentary filmmaking in post-revolutionary China from my perspective as an organizer and coordinator of Yunfest in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province.
Yang Kun is the main organizer of the biennial Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest: www.yunfest.org).
Please bring your lunch with you.
Time:
11:00am-12:00pm
Description:
Tuesday 26 August 2008
11am - 12 noon in Seminar Room A (Room 1002), Coombs Building
Chris Ballard - PAH
Text, Image and the Encounter: Miklouho-Maclay's 1879 New Hebrides Sketches
Abstract
Despite acquiring a camera on the eve of his departure for the Melanesian islands in 1879, Miklouho-Maclay relied almost entirely on his pencil to capture his engagements with Melanesian communities. His insistence on identifying the subjects of his sketches by name, and on filling the margins of his albums with notes about their lives and material cultures (in an often bewildering mixture of Russian, German, English and local Melanesian languages), has enabled descendants of those communities to recognise ancestors, identify specific locations and reproduce artefacts from the early history of colonial encounters in what is now Vanuatu. These same marginalia - including word-lists, stray comments from on-lookers, and Miklouho-Maclay's personal reflections - also afford us with rare insight into the contexts for the production of the drawings, as precise moments in the choreography of his sketching can be teased out and reconstructed from the interplay between images and marginalia. This paper further explores a series of recent interactions and exchanges with filwokas (fieldworkers) of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in seeking to interpret both images and texts, and to understand their potential significance for contemporary Vanuatu communities
Time:
2:00pm-3:00pm
Description:
Rural Household's demand for electricity: Evidences from Musi Banyuasin (Muba) District in South Sumatra
Ari Kuncoro
Department of Economics, University of Indonesia and Visiting Fellow, Indonesia Project
Abstract
HIV/AIDS is often projected as an exceptional phenomenon: a world-historical event, a huge threat to the wellbeing and future of affected societies, and an unprecedented challenge for a global response. With a central interest in HIV and AIDS in the island Pacific, this presentation will offer some thoughts on the shifting contexts for the international response.
It will argue that the case for ‘AIDS exceptionalism’, while entailing both advantages and disadvantages for tackling AIDS, is becoming harder to sustain; and will conclude with some reflections on the framework provided by the Millennium Development Goals for addressing changing health, including HIV/AIDS, in the Pacific.
About the speaker
Vicki Luker is an historian of health change in the Pacific. She is currently executive editor of the Journal of Pacific History and Research Fellow at the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program, ANU. Her most recent publication is ‘Papua New Guinea: epidemiological transition, public health and the Pacific’ in Milton J. Lewis and Kerrie L. MacPherson (eds) Public Health in Asia and the Pacific: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge 2008).
Time:
11:00am-12:30pm
Description:
Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies
DIVISION OF PACIFIC & ASIAN HISTORY
11am - 12:30pm Thursday 28 August 2008; in Seminar Room F (Room 3233), Coombs Building
Dr Andrei Lankov - PAH
Is North korea Moving Back? North Korea Counter Reforms of 2005-2007
Abstract
The recent 15 years of North Korean history have been a time of both dramatic crisis and deep social change. There were no reforms, but degree of the government control diminished dramatically, and the grassroots market activities, capitalist in nature, quietly replaced the old Stalinist economy. These changes developed from below, but sometimes won reluctant approval from the government as well. This limited liberalization reached its height around 2003. However, the last few years have been the time when the North Korean government persistently worked to revive the old system, getting rid of the dangerously liberal institutions which developed in the 1990s. There were attempts to restrict or ban private economic activity, to re-assert state control over individuals. In other words, once situation began to improve, the North Korean government chose to go back to the tried patterns of Kim Il Sung era. This policy is ruinous economically, but might have some political rationale.
Time:
12:00pm-2:00pm
Description:
12-2pm Thursday 28 August
Room 10.04 Coombs Extension
Dr Ruth Barraclough
"Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class"
Abstract:
The story of South Korea and Japan’s transformation into capitalist powers over the course of the twentieth century has been amply recorded. What is less well known are the individual stories that tell the dramatic saga of this transformation. This talk introduces a new book /Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class/, which contains contributions from leading new scholars in anthropology, history, literary studies and gender studies. The book’s co-editor, Ruth Barraclough, will explain why a book on gender and capitalist cultures in Japan and Korea looks at industrial labour and sex labour together. She will discuss how a key feature of the advance of industrialisation in Korea and Japan was the associated development of a modern sex labour market. Tying industrial labour and sexual labour together, she will discuss a range of key questions:
In what economy do we place the “labour” of the former “comfort women”?
Why have sex workers not been part of the labour movements of Korea and Japan?
Why has it been difficult to be “working-class” and “feminine”?
How do financial crises translate into gender crises?
