2018 Annual Conference
Free Attendance for All
Sponsored by:
-The British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS)
-The University of Oxford China Centre
-Asian Studies Centre, St Antony’s College
Organisational Support:
Keynote Speakers
Prof. Eva Kit Wah Man, Hong Kong Baptist University
Opening Keynote: June the 21st,9:00-10: 30 am
Prof. Eva Man is currently the Director of Film Academy and Chair Professor in Humanities of Hong Kong Baptist University. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, comparative philosophy, woman studies, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art and cultural criticism. She was a Fulbright scholar conducted research at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was named AMUW Endowed Woman Chair Professor of the 100th Anniversary of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the USA in 2009. She contributes public services to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong Museums Advisory Committee and Hong Kong Public Libraries and other committees for LCSD and Home Affairs Bureau of HKSAR, and Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Arts and Cultural Heritage projects.
Revelations of Chinese Philosophy and Feminist Philosophy, Comparative Studies and Case Studies
This talk starts with personal notes before the theoretical discussion, which format confirms my beliefs that the real drive to philosophy and art is better to be concrete, existential, connecting to people, with emotion and they should address to real life issues. This explains my alternative approach in opening this speech with the subject “What Does Comparative Philosophy Mean to a Female Chinese Scholar Like Me?”
The discussion then proceeds to some reflections on the Confucian living framework and comparative philosophy. Life experience brings a much better understanding of feminist discourses and their conversations with Confucianism when I contrasted them from the philosophical level to the social and political levels. Comparative philosophy is also sensible for doing philosophy for it is simply a good strategy to consider a wide range of enduring and respected ideas. In this address, I demonstrate my agreement with the above premises from my study approach to the subject, bodies in China, using Chinese philosophy and feminist reflections as frames of reference.
The discussion starts from some of the conceptual models that feminist scholars propose, which seek to displace Platonic dualism and emancipate our concepts of the body from Cartesian mechanistic models or metaphors. I explore how the Chinese philosophical ideas offered by Confucians and Daoists may provide an alternative body ontology to the critical practices of feminists. I then share my research on case studies of female aesthetical representations in classical Chinese works such as The Book of Songs and contemporary body art in China. These representations demonstrate an intertwining relationship among the body, sexuality, aesthetics and gendered roles in their social environments. These case studies are also living illustrations of the connections, dynamics and transformations of the homogenous and heterogenous China.
Dr. Maria Jaschok, University of Oxford
Closing Keynote: June the 22nd, 3:30-5: 00 pm
Dr Maria Jaschok is a Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall and Director of the International Gender Studies Centre (IGS) at Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). She is affiliated to Contemporary China Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies.
Her research interests are in the areas of gendered constructions of memory; feminist and aural ethnography; innovative research methodologies and uses of oral history in the writing of women’s history in Asian contexts (particularly in regard to China). She has conducted collaborative research projects in central China since the mid-90s, addressing issues and implications of growing female membership of religions for local citizenship and civil society. She has co-presented and co-authored with her Chinese collaborator, Shui Jingjun, in China and internationally, in Chinese and in English, seeking to make published findings fully accessible to their respective home audiences. At present at work on their final book in a trilogy focused on central China's gendered Islamic culture, textual interpretations of chants from the cultural tradition of women’s mosque build on earlier research published under the titles of women, Religion, and Space in China and The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam. She has recently completed a collaborative research project, working together with ethno-musicologists and sociologists in a study of Islamic soundscapes in China (Leverhulme grant). She is a member of many international academic and professional organizations, serving on steering committees, editorial and advisory boards.
Heterogeneity, Gender and Religious Piety in Central China's Hui Muslim Communities
Our research among female-led Islamic organizations in Hui Muslim communities in Central China has focused more recently on certain notable trends whereby a younger generation of assertive and forceful women leaders make traditional sites of female-centred institutions of worship, i.e. women’s mosques (nüsi 女寺), their sites of diversification of Muslim practices as well as of pedagogical innovation and expressive creativity. In the context of China’s present-day volatile civil space, the strong resurgence of religiosity is carrying a marked feminine imprint. Opening up to cultural influences from Muslim societies beyond national borders, an intermingling of local and translocal ideas and practices is shaped by charismatic transmitters, or ‘vernacularizers’, into intense renewal of a collectively engendered female piety and reconnection with a highly expressive gendered soundscape of Islamic chants and eulogies. Abiding religio-cultural gender segregation serves to preserve and safeguard women’s historical claim to their own sites of congregation, guided, managed and represented by female leaderships, including ahong(阿訇), managers and advisors. Yet women’s continued occupation of their traditional space has developed into assertions of unprecedented engagement with a rapidly modernizing society beyond mosque gates, indeed beyond national borders. With an increased physical and virtual mobility helped by more affluent Hui Muslim congregations, thus creating more opportunities for women to join pilgrimages and making also for more frequent social and religious visits by groups or individual women to various Muslim countries as well as increased use of transborder channels of communication, the unique Chinese tradition of female-led women’s mosques is coming to be expressive of the heterogeneity of gendered lives both within China and within a global Islamic community with which historically there had been little or no connection.
Timeline
2 Keynote Speakers, 70 panel presenters and 2 artists
Conference Panels
Two-Day Conference with 4 Parallel PanelsPlease click "More Posts"South China SeaDr. Alessandro Uras; Aletheia Kerygma. B. Valenciano; Mark Hoskin Dr. Alessandro Uras Research...Langyi Tian; Hairong Wang; Xu Heng Langyi Tian The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen),...Cultural RevolutionAvital Avina; Qiuyang Chen; Barclay Bram-Shoemaker Avital Avina Year 3 PhD Candidate Chinese...More PostsTwo Artists Presentations
Come to Mok Common Room at 12:20pm !!
Yishen Chen, University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Arts, Year 2 MA Book Arts
June 21st, Day 1
“Marrying a Jinjiang bride is better than robbing a bank.”
The wedding rituals in the artist’s hometown Jinjiang, a small city in south-eastern China, are tied to an intense son preference tradition. Since the family would afford a staggering sum to dower a daughter, some of them believe that having a baby girl suggests a large outcome in the future and taking this as ‘an excuse’ for their preference for boys. And there’s a saying prevailed on the network in recent years that ‘marrying a Jinjiang bride is better than robbing a bank’, which always accompanied with photos of brides who wear lots of golden necklaces, bracelets, and rings outside their wedding dresses. The jewellery comes from the bride’s parents and the invited guests to the wedding banquet, and all of the gold would be kept as the brides’ dowry, which actually belongs to their husbands. However, it is hard to tell whether it is a gift from the parents and guests, a suit of armour to protect the girls from poverty, or just chains made of gold to lock them up.
Yishen Chen, as a performance artist who is recently exploring the gender discrimination issue in her hometown, and as a future Jinjiang bride at the same time, would like to invite all the participants at the conference to join her performance, by adding slight pieces of ‘jewellery’ on her in a traditional Jinjiang way. Through this interactive piece of work, Yishen aims to examine the feminist implication of jewellery on the specific figure, Jinjiang bride, and discuss about how gender, rituals and jewellery interact within societies.
Emily Gong, OPGDC Regent's, External Relations Officer
June 22nd, Day 2
A Contemporary Landscape Painting
This presentation will take the creative form of painting on different materials. Complemented by voice-overs, the audio information both leads and is guided by the direction and movement of the paint. This presentation seeks to use the expressive quality of paint with voice-overs in the form of spoken words to help engage the visual and auditory senses of audience members. The words, some incoherent sentences, others in abstract phrases or single sounds combined with painted images, symbols and blotches will create an incoherently coherent painting. As the audience experiences this process, I hope to encourage them to push past logical thinking and experience through feeling a multitude of senses – as they try to use the visual and auditory information to make sense of the speculative or contradictory dynamics, complex connections (guanxi), and sharp changes and transformations in China’s Art Market. Additionally, this process will enable them to get a glimpse of the inner workings of this Market. While the art markets shrank in the rest of the world in 2008, China’s grew by 12%. In 2010, China broke the world record for fine art auction turnover. Surpassing both the UK and USA becoming not only the fastest-growing market, but also the leader of the international art world. What are the forces making this sharp rise and change possible? Is this rapid change sustainable? These questions will be regarded through the cultural forces and motivators below: Consumption Cultural Capital Social Mobility Suzhi Cultural Nationalism Taste Cultural Economy And by looking into the changing dynamics of individual to institutional actors and their shifting roles and attitudes in reaction to the rapid change in the state(s) of China’s art market. The bulk of this presentation comes from my Master’s dissertation, additional case studies, and years more of pondering to further understand and grapple to make sense of what is happening. I invite the audience to join me on this experience.
Map of China Centre
BTW: Our wifi is "The Cloud"
The dinner on 21st will be held in University Club at your own cost. :)
Time: 6:00:pm-9:00pm ; Postcode:OX1 3SZ
- Contact Us
Organising Team: Ling Tang, Linda Qian, Annie Xu, Tsunghan Wu
Abstract Team: Helena F. S. Lopes, Rosalind Miller, Linda Qian, Elizabeth Smith Rosser, Ling Tang, Hannah Theaker, Annie Xu
On-site Management Team: Maxime Dargaud-Fons, Linda Qian, Elizabeth Smith Rosser, Ling Tang, Jingyi Wang, Xiaochu Wu, Yeo Min Hui, Yun Yu
Photographer: Junchi Deng
University of Oxford China Centre
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