CISSR SPOTLIGHT

 
 
 
 

The Global Coronavirus Epidemic: Commentary on East Asia’s Response

 
 
 

CISSR Dissertation Fellow Wan-Zi Lu’s essay comparing government responses to mask shortages across East Asia was featured in the Contexts Magazine, translated, and picked up by major news outlets throughout the region. Wan-Zi describes the interventions and strategies employed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore and argues that the differences reveal the underlying power structures of each country. In South Korea and Taiwan, mask distribution has been a cornerstone of government efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 and gather personal information amid the crisis. In Singapore and Hong Kong, government officials pressure corporations to demonstrate social responsibility by not profiteering and sending supplies to hospitals.


Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public issued a call for opinion-editorials on the insights sociology can provide about the pandemic and received nearly 200 responses. Wan-Zi’s entry was included in the first selections which focused on East Asia’s response, and her research has been translated and republished on multiple additional forums. Read more here…


In Translation:

Taiwanese Sociological Association

The Reporter

WeThinker


 
 
 
 

UPCOMING EVENTS

 
 
 
  
 
 

TUESDAY, May 19

Institute of Politics, Government and Policy Club

Economic Justice After COVID-19

Gene Sperling, Former Director of the National Economic Council

12:00pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

WEDNESDAY, May 20

Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, Hebrew Bible Workshop

Israel and Judah: Two Kingdoms or Two Peoples? Or, Are We Asking the Wrong Questions?

Avraham Faust, Bar-Ilan University

5:00pm, Live Stream


 
 

UChicago Medicine, Hyde Park Institute

A Cautionary Tale of Received Wisdom in Medicine

Andrew Oehler, University of Chicago

5:30pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

Oriental Institute

Oriental Institute Members' Lecture

Yorke Rowan, Oriental Institute

7:00pm, YouTube


 
 

FRIDAY, May 22

Program on Global Environment, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, Institute of Politics, Chicago Studies

Frizzell Speaker and Learning Series: Food in Focus: Global Hunger and the COVID Pandemic 

Panel Discussion

12:00pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

Social Science Research Center

Remote Archival Research Workshop

Panel Discussion

12:15pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 
  
 
 

TUESDAY, May 26

Harris Public Policy Center, Pearson Institute 

Confronting COVID-19: Coronavirus in Contexts of Conflict and Postconflict

 Kara Ross Camarena, University of Chicago; Maurice Amollo, Mercy Corps; Gyude Moore, Center for Global Development; and Zaher Sahloul, MedGlobal

12:30pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

FRIDAY, May 29

Pearson Institute Latin America Policy Forum

An Optimistic View on Latin America

James Robinson, University of Chicago

12:00pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture Club, Divinity Students Association

Reimagining Daoist Alchemy, Decolonizing Transhumanism

Zhange Ni, Virginia Tech

2:00pm, Live Stream

To RSVP, contact ryansbingham@uchicago.edu


 
 

Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop

Configuring A Vertical Field: Multi-Level Buddhist Cave-Temples in Dunhuang and Beyond

Zhenru Zhou, University of Chicago

4:30pm, Live Stream

 For Zoom link, contact the VMPEA coordinators


 
 
 
 

AROUND TOWN & DOWN THE ROAD

 
 
   
 

May 19

Chicago Council on Global Affairs

The Global Resurgence of Antisemitism

Andrew Goldberg; Jonathan Greenblatt, Anti-Defamation League; and Tess Owen, VICE News

2:15pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

May 26

Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Pandemic Leadership

Gro Brundtland, Former Prime Minister of Norway and Former Director-General of the World Health Organization

10:00am, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

June 2

Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory

2020 Elections: Race, Youth, and the Impact of Covid-19

Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago, and Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago

12:00pm, Live Stream

Registration Required


 
 

African Studies Workshop

Ecological Infrastructures: Reevaluating Archaeological Approaches to African Foragers

Matthew Knisley, University of Chicago

5:30pm, Live Stream

Zoom link will be circulated via the ASW listserv


 
   
 

June 3

Oriental Institute

Oriental Institute Centennial Year Members Lecture

W. Raymond Johnson, Oriental Institute

7:00pm, YouTube


 
 

June 4

Semiotics Workshop

“Code-Switching," Community, and Standardizing Singlish 

Josh Babcock, University of Chicago

4:30pm, Live Stream

Zoom link will be circulated via the listserv


 
 

ONLINE EXHIBITS

 
 

Oriental Institute

Hieroglyphic

Persepolis

Doing Business in the Ancient World


 
 

Smart Museum of Art

The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China


 
 
 
 

NEWS & RESEARCH ROUNDUP

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Dynamics of African Cinema


CISSR Faculty Fellow Natacha Nsabimana interviewed filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza for e-flux’s École du soir: Six Films, from Rwanda and Beyond series. Discussing Ruhorahoza’s film Grey Matter, Nsabimana and Ruhorahoza cover the tensions between institutions, funding sources, and artists and the expectations of Africa that are imposed on African creators and African stories. Read more here...


 
 
 
 
 
 

Higher Education and Pinochet


Recently, 2017-18 CISSR Faculty Fellows Maria Bautista and Luis Martinez and their co-authors Felipe González, Pablo Munoz, and Mounu Prem published their working paper "Chile's Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility.” Under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, higher education faced hostile policies and capture by the regime, and the authors study the longterm effects on social mobility and human capital.  Read more here...


 
 
 
 
 
 

Global Trade, COVID-19, and India


India has recently increased its efforts to attract US companies currently manufacturing their goods in China as global tensions with China rise amidst the coronavirus pandemic. CISSR Faculty Fellow Paul Staniland was quoted in the Business Standard article "Covid-19 impact: India looks to lure more than 1,000 US firms out of China” to discuss the opportunities and challenges India faces in order to pursue these goals. Read more here...


 
 
 
 
 
 

Anti-Colonialists Wanted the World


CISSR Book Workshop awardee Adom Getachew participated in an interview centered on the themes of her book Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination with Sa’eed Husaini for Jacobin. Getachew explains anti-colonial worldmaking and her "commitment to thinking about the national and international together and avoiding a binary between nationalism and internationalism…"  Read more here...


 
 
 
 
 
 

Land Reform Implementation in Peru


CISSR Faculty Fellow Michael Albertus recently published his article “Does Equalizing Assets Spur Development? Evidence From Large-Scale Land Reform in Peru” with Bogdan G. Popescu, Bocconi University, in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Through an investigation of Peru’s attempts at land reform, Albertus and Popescu discuss why these efforts failed to create economic and social mobility.  Read more here...


 
 

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Preparing an article on the Taiping and Nian wars in mid-nineteenth-century China has taken me back to Tobie Meyer-Fong's masterful What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century China. Rather than treating the Taiping War in terms of military, political, or religious history, Meyer-Fong focuses on the material and emotional experiences of those who lived and died during the war. In so doing, she shows how war disrupted theoretically firm distinctions (e.g. friend vs. foe) and moral standards and reminds us that understanding the scale of great tragedies requires paying attention to how individual lives were saved, lost, and re-made.

— Daniel Knorr, CISSR Dissertation Fellow 

To visit Tobie Meyer-Fong’s Johns Hopkins University faculty page...

 
 
 


 
 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT


 
 
 
Martha Roth | On Judicial Violence in Mesopotamia: The Problem of An Eye For An Eye
 
 
 

Judicial Violence in Mesopotamia

 
 
 

In March, the Oriental Institute hosted Martha Roth to present "On Judicial Violence in Mesopotamia: The Problem of An Eye For An Eye" for their Centennial Year Members’ Lecture series. Roth focuses on the ways in which the state perpetrates legalized violence against its people, in both fatal and non-fatal ways, and specifically the punishments that target parts of the head.


 
 
  
 
  
 
 
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