The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies invites graduate students to participate in the workshop “Garbage and Landfill in Asian Documentary Films.”
The workshop will be led by USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies Kiriyama Professor, Chia-ju Chang (Brooklyn College-City University of New York). Her first book in Chinese, The Global Imagination of the Ecological Communities: Western and Chinese Ecocritical Praxis (Jiangsu University Press, 2013), won the 2013 Bureau of Jiangsu Province Journalism and Publication Book Award (Social Science division).
This workshop will look at the issue of waste and excess in our contemporary societies, and filmic representations of unwanted matter, landfills and deserted places. Focusing on China and India, we will use documentary as a genre to engage discourses of toxicity, political apathy, and environmental injustice. It urges us to visualize and conceptualize an interwoven geopolitics brought together by the imbalance of hemisphere/continent, nation, race/ethnicity, class/caste, and gender, etc.
This is the first workshop in a two part series aimed at intersecting Asian Studies with the emerging field of environmental humanities. The overarching theme of this workshop is on waste in Asian Anthropocene societies as well as its cultural articulations and cinematic representations. The workshop will employ a critical eco-materialist approach to conceptualize waste matter as a unit of of material assemblage, or a thing to examine out day-to-day life’s production, biologically, materially, culturally, aesthetically, and ethically. Students will come up with their own critical perspective and at the same time gain a deeper understanding of environmental issues and cultural production in Asia.
Students are encouraged to also consider joining us for workshop #2, “Garbage in Asian Animal Documentary Films,” scheduled for March 29, 2016. The call for applications for that workshop will be posted separately closer to that date.
To Apply:
Interested graduate students are welcome to apply to participate in the workshop.
Space is limited. Registration is free of charge.
Date: February 25, 2016 – 3:30pm – 5:30pm
Place: University of San Francisco (location TBA)
Interested graduate students should send an email to ahdzida@usfca.edu (subject line: Asian Waste Matter: Garbage and Strays) with the following information:
Name
University affiliation
Year in program
Review of applications will begin Monday, February 8, 2016 and continue until all spaces are filled.
A small number of travel grants ($150 max) will be available to assist participants traveling to USF from outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.
If applying for a travel grant, please include a CV and a statement about how this will workshop complement your studies.
Melissa S. Dale, Ph.D.
Executive Director & Assistant Professor
Center for Asia Pacific Studies
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton St., KA-180A
San Francisco, CA 94117-1080
(415) 422-2590