2021
Research Seminar Series (14/2021)
"In the Shadow of State-Led Gentrification: The commercialisation of residential properties in Seoul"
Speaker: Professor Hyun Bang Shin
Date: 24 November 2021 (Wednesday)
Time: 4.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here
Contact person: Ms. Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Koh Sin Yi (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity,2016), Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015),
Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and Covid-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a (post-)pandemic world
(LSE Press, 2021). He is the Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation. Personal web
Abstract
This talk examines the rise and deepening of commercial gentrification in Seoul, South Korea, which has developed in the context of speculative urbanisation that has characterised South Korea’s urban accumulation in recent decades.
Building upon the findings of a case study situated in central Seoul, Professor Hyun put forward arguments that are two-fold. Firstly, he argues that the rise of commercial gentrification in recent years is a by-product of decades-long new-build gentrification. Secondly, the Korean version of commercial gentrification distinguishes itself from the retail or commercial gentrification of the West, exacerbating the conditions of living through exclusionary displacement that reduces affordable housing stocks.
Professor Hyun concludes by reflecting upon the theoretical contributions that can be made by the study of commercial gentrification in South Korea.
Research Seminar Series (13/2021)
"Migrant decision-making: The Choice of Malaysia as a Popular Destination by Nepali Migrants"
Speaker: Ms Sharmini Nathan
Date: Tuesday, 2 November 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Marek Rutkowski (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Shamini Nathan, Sharmini Nathan is a researcher at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include exploring South- South migration and the complex challenges that developing countries face not only as countries of origin, but also as countries of destination.
Abstract
In this seminar Shamini Nathan will talk about The empirical study of migrants, their adaptive capacities, the policy environment they face upon entry into the host country, the relations between migrants and the local population, as well as the political, economic, and social implications of international migration is a subject area of enormous significance in today's globalized world. International migration has been, and will be an ongoing phenomenon producing major transformative effects on communities and states voluntarily or involuntarily receiving migrants. Migrant perceptions, knowledge and decision-making, with specific reference to socio-psychological, subjective, emotional and cognitive aspects of migration in the Global South is under-studied. With restrictions in the Global North, South-South migration has become increasingly popular. One of the key research objectives of the MIDEQ (Migration for Development and Equality) Nepal-Malaysia Corridor is to investigate the decision-making environment and process of Nepali migrant workers in choosing Malaysia as their preferred destination. For the SASS research seminar series, I will therefore discuss the emerging themes in migrant decision-making from the responses received during interviews as to why Malaysia is a popular destination for employment with Nepali migrant workers.
This research project is part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Migration for Development and Equality Hub or MIDEQ, funded by the United Kingdom Research Innovation (UKRI). For more information on the research, please visit mideq.org
Research Seminar Series (12/2021)
"The Public and Personal Rights of Muslim Women in Malaysia: Findings from the survey on Muslim women's realities in Malaysia"
Speaker: Ms Rozana Isa
Date: Tuesday, 26th October 2021
Time: 12.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Ms.Vizla Kumerasan (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Rozana Isa is currently the Executive Director for Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian NGO working on women’s rights within the framework of Islam. She is also with Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. She joined the Malaysian women’s rights movement in 1999 to address violence against women. This exposed her to challenges women face to have their rights recognised and exercised in a context of Islamisation within a democratic nation with parallel legal systems, where gender, ethnic, and religious diversities are celebrated in society yet negated at different levels of policies and laws. Before taking up SIS’s helm, Rozana worked with several national, regional, and international women’s rights organisations.
Abstract
In this seminar Rozana Isa will talk about Malaysian Muslim women who are living in unprecedented times. They embrace modernity, aim to live their dreams, journeying on paths forged by many women before them, role models, icons and influencers, whether within their family or beyond. Nevertheless, for many women still, there remains a discomfort within the space to which they are confined, as they struggle to carefully balance between who they are and the idea they have about gender equality and the expectations placed on them by their families, religion and society.
This session will uncover the findings of the national survey conducted in 2019 titled Perceptions and Realities - The Public and Personal Rights of Muslim Women in Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (11/2021)
"Migration intermediaries: Lessons from the Nepal-Malaysia Corridor"
Speaker: Ms Yvonne Khor Gee Weon
Date: Tuesday, 5th October 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Professor Helen Nesadurai (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Yvonne Khor Gee Weon was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Prior to joining Monash University Malaysia, Yvonne was a Senior Researcher at a local think tank in Malaysia. She was involved in various research projects related to the drafting of national policies on development by Members of Parliament and Senators.
Abstract
Research on migration intermediaries is more diverse than ever before. The migration process has become more sophisticated and complex due to multiple formal/informal, human/non-human, and state/non-state actors overlapping as intermediaries.
Migration intermediaries can be understood as actors and institutions that foster, facilitate or sustain human mobility. As part of the ‘Migration for Development and Equality Hub’ (MIDEQ) project, my talk explores the roles of intermediaries along the Nepal-Malaysia corridor. I will present preliminary findings on the different state configurations, connections and linkages between intermediaries in facilitating migration from Nepal to Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (10/2021)
"Gendering Nepal-Malaysia's Migration Corridor"
Speaker: Ms Nadiah Ahmad
Date: Tuesday, 14th September 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Joseph N. Goh (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Nadiah Ahmad is a researcher at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include exploring inequalities in the Global South and evaluating socio-economic or political interventions that address them.
Abstract
This research project aims to discuss the nature of migration in the Global South, with a focus on the Nepal-Malaysia corridor. As the Nepali migrant population is the third largest in Malaysia, it is thus pertinent to explore their migration motives, aspirations and expectations. As part of this, the research evaluates the ways in which migration addresses unique inequalities experienced by Nepali, as well as how they are maintained or exacerbated despite migration. More broadly, the research contributes to growing knowledge on the permanence of temporary migration along this corridor and within the southern Asian region, as well as how this is affected by and in turn, impacts on Malaysia’s socio-economic and political realities.
For the SASS research seminar series, I present current findings on the gender dimensions of Nepal-Malaysia corridor. This includes findings on how gender shapes migratory desires, expectations and decisions, the everyday experiences between Nepali men and women in Malaysia, as well as the extent to which migration positively or negatively reconstructs pre-existing gender inequalities.
This research project is part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Migration for Development and Equality Hub or MIDEQ, funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). For more information on the research, please visit mideq.org
Research Seminar Series (09/2021)
"Urban Space and the Movies: Cinemagoing in Kuala Lumpur"
Speaker: Dr Agata Frymus
Date: Tuesday, 17th August 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Kyle Moore (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Agata Frymus is a film historian and a Lecturer in Film, TV and Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. She is the author of Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood (Rutgers University Press), as well as articles published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Feminist Media Studies, amongst others.
Abstract
By the mid-1970s “every gazetted urban area in Peninsular Malaysia had at least one cinema,” bringing the total number of movie venues throughout the country to 368 (Grenfell 1979). One can extrapolate that the country had approximately one cinema seat for every sixteen inhabitants – the ratio comparable to that of France. By 1978, Kuala Lumpur had more cinemas per capita than its neighbouring city-state, Singapore. Moviegoing played a crucial role in structuring the pleasures of the city, attracting all kinds of audiences: English, Malay, Cantonese and Tamil speakers; men and women; young and old; middle and working-class. The scale of the phenomenon is even more striking if we consider that more and more citizens were getting access to television. Globally, this tended to signal a rapid reduction in moviegoing; in Malaysia, however, that was not the case.
This study combines an analysis of archival materials – popular and trade press – with oral history. As part of this project, I have conducted fifteen, semi-structured, one-hour interviews with Malaysians between the ages of 62 and 78, focusing on their memories of cinema and leisure in Kuala Lumpur. The principle concern was that of the position of cinemagoing in the lives of the interviewees during the 1970s, its relation to collective sociability, but also the role it played in their perceptions of the cityscape as whole. Which cinemas did they patronise, who with, and why? How did cinemagoing of their youth differ from their experience of the metropolis today?
Research Seminar Series (08/2021)
"Managing impressions of culpability: Examining Arul Kanda’s deployment of membership categories in his BFM interview"
Speaker: Dr David Yoong
Date: Wednesday, 28th July 2021
Time: 12.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Ms Kaflina Kamalul (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Dr David Yoong is an independent scholar and education consultant who specialise in research writing and critical discourse analysis. He was Deputy Dean of Research & Development at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya (UM) and Research Associate at the Faculty of Medicine, UM. He is now the Director of DYLiberated Learning Resources.
Abstract
One measure taken by the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund in 2016 to address its corporate and political scandal was to accept an invitation from a radio station, BFM. To show how its CEO, Arul Kanda successfully managed impressions of culpability in this complex and adversarial interview, the analysis uses membership categorisation analysis. In this talk, I discuss three aspects: the downgrades of morally and ethically wrong behaviour, the association of bad behaviour, and the reframing of perceived abnormalities. This research is driven by two purposes: i) to demystify the complex communication of 1MDB and the CEO’s methods in navigating around tough questions, and ii) to contribute to the growing field of accountability interview analysis, especially in the South-East Asian region.
Research Seminar Series (07/2021)
"Kafkaesque cinema in the context of post-fascism"
Speaker: Associate Professor Angelos Koutsourakis
Date: Tuesday, 6th July 2021
Time: 4.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Chrishandra Sebastiampillai (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Angelos Koutsourakis is Associate Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures (University of Leeds) and AHRC research leadership fellow. He is the author of Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a book titled Kafkaesque Cinema (contracted with Edinburgh University Press).
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine Kafkaesque cinema within the historical context of post-fascism. Taking as a starting point that Kafkaesque cinema needs to be understood beyond its association with an apolitical aesthetics of mood, I suggest that the Kafkaesque cinematic aesthetic develops themes and motifs from Kafka’s oeuvre, or from authors who can be understood as Kafkaesque, and is rooted in his critique of modernity, but it also extends beyond his work and his historical experiences. Such an approach can enable us to understand the global dimension of the Kafkaesque as it emerges in different geographical spaces and historical periods as a response to the long crisis of liberalism that extends from the late nineteenth century to the present. Here, I intend to focus on Kafkaesque cinema as a response to historical conditions of post-fascism, a term which I will qualify below, through the close reading of three films: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000), and Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018). Important interlocutors in the essay are the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás and the Italian historian Enzo Traverso; both understand post-fascism as a contemporary mutation of classical fascism, but simultaneously as a historical phenomenon that perpetuates the latter’s hostility to the Enlightenment.
Research Seminar Series (06/2021)
"The Big Walk: Detention and migration stories in Britain (Artivism in a pandemic)?"
Speaker: Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
Date: Wednesday, 23rd June 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Jonathan Driskell (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald FASSA, FRSA is Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) at Monash University Malaysia. In 2018 she co-founded Justice, Arts, and Migration whilst Distinguished Professor (Film and Media) at Lincoln, prior to which she was Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at UNSW (Sydney), where she also served as Academic Lead of the Grand Challenge for Refugees and Migrants. Her book, There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema, won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award in 2018. Other titles include Childhood and Nation in World Cinema: Borders and Encounters (2017), Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture (2014), Little Friends: Children’s Film and Media Culture in New China (2005) and Public Secrets: Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (2000). Her current research looks at images of migration, detention, youth and childhood.
Abstract
Justice, Arts and Migration (JAM) represented an evolution in my long-term research interests, which have encompassed, most notably, cinema and the visual arts, primarily in China, Europe, and Australia; children’s media; and domestic (intra-Chinese) and global migration. The hypothesis being explored in JAM projects is that creative arts practice has a unique power not just to influence public opinion about questions of migration, refuge, and asylum, but actually to change perceptions and so produce new forms of understanding and encourage ethically informed activism.
The longer background to JAM research and engagement is my earlier study of migrant children in world cinema, whose findings were published in the monograph, There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema (2018a). In that work, I developed an ‘action research’ methodology that enriched analyses of cinematic representations of migrant children by juxtaposing them against accounts of film-making workshops she undertook with migrant children in Australia, China and the UK. This work has been further refined in my methodological argument in partnership with the British Film Institute’s Cent Ans de Jeunesse programme of film art and film-making (2019a) and her critique of activist film featuring children (2019b). This combination of critical analysis with engaged creative practice provided the methodological platform for a new programme of work conceived and developed at Lincoln from 2018 onwards. There's No Place Like Home and The Big Walk projects focussed on adult migrants and asylum seekers, as well as children, to explore and explain how practices and strategies across a number of creative arts might help to
- inform and refine public understanding of the experience of contemporary migrants, refugees and asylum seekers
- influence the practice of artists and professional curators as they engage with questions of migration, displacement, detention and hospitality
- inject a cultural and creative dimension into campaigns for the ethical treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. raised public awareness about issues of migration, refuge, and asylum.
In this presentation I will screen extracts from The Big Walk (Davis, 2020) and discuss the strategies that are explored in her work and how they relate to the JAM projects overall.
Research Seminar Series (05/2021)
"Escaping the Golden Age – Pictorial Hermitage and Non-Aspirational Youth Poetry"
Speaker: Associate Professor Yi Zheng
Date: Thursday, 27th May 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Agata Frymus (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Yi Zheng, associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature, the University of New South Wales; honorary lecturer professor, Sichuan University. Selected publications: From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature (Purdue University Press 2011), Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middleclass Taste (Routledge 2013); From Crisis Poetics to Place Fiction: Collected Essays on Modern Chinese Literature, (Huamulan Publishing House 2018), ‘1911 in Chengdu: A Novel History’, boundary 2 (Vol. 47, No. 1 2020: 177-203); ‘The World of Twentieth-Century Chinese Popular Fiction: From Shanghai Express to Rivers and Lakes of Knights-Errant,’ Zhang, Yingjin (ed.), A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (Wiley-Blackwell 2015: 244-260).
Abstract
Escapist literature usually refers to popular generic forms that encourage flights of fancy. They are understood to foster an imaginative turning away from the real world. This presentation looks at contemporary Chinese escapist genres in the framework of China’s classical utopian hermitage tradition and the idea of escape as non-engagement. Through examples of Lao Shu’s popular pictorials that teach individual spiritual hermitage, and award-winning but non-aspirational campus poetry that deliberately adheres to a circumscribed world vision, it explores what it means for individuals to (want to) escape the Chinese Golden Age (sheng shi).
Research Seminar Series (04/2021)
"Genre Publics: Popular Music, Technologies and Class in Indonesia"
Speaker: Associate Professor Emma Baulch
Date: Tuesday, 11th May 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Tan Meng Yoe (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Emma Baulch is an Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research is located in the fields of Asian cultural studies and media and communications studies. She is interested in how new media technologies alter and are altered by existing Southeast Asian social formations revolving around race, class and ethnicity. Most of her research work is ethnographic in nature, and attends to the interaction of material and social worlds through a focus on the everyday uses of new media technologies.
Abstract
In this seminar, Emma will be talking about her new book, Genre Publics (Wesleyan UP 2020). The book looks at conceptions of ‘the local’ inherent to Indonesia’s local music boom of the late 1990s. She argues that defining ‘the local’ of the local music boom implicates a class politics with historical roots in Indonesia's 'capitalist revolution' of the 1970s, when popular music genres played a foundational role in class formation. She shows how this history haunts conceptions of citizenship in present-day Indonesia, but also how ideological and technological shifts in the 1990s and 2000s have altered the meanings of popular music genres, reshaping Indonesian senses of the modern in dialogue with democratization and rising consumerism.
Research Seminar Series (03/2021)
"Why do people clean? Reflection of fieldwork on Malaysian Chinese household cleaning practices"
Speaker: Dr Chan Lay Tyng
Date: Tuesday, 13th April 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Lay Tyng CHAN recently received her PhD in Marketing from Monash University (Malaysia). She is determined to dedicate her research life to improve social and environmental well-being after seeing the bloody images of scrawny polar bear feeding on her own cub in the National Geographic magazine. Her deep concern for social and environmental problems drives her interest to understand everyday practices and market systems which, she believes, carry the seed of social and behavior change. She sees herself as a rebellious and eccentric post-modernist with a particular interest in practice theory, native ethnography, and hermeneutics. A multi-potentialite, Lay Tyng is also the founder of a micro-sized stuffed toy repairing clinic, a home-based vegan food producer and an aspiring story-teller. She is currently carving a path to integrate all the elements that spark joy in her life.
Abstract
The research involves a 20-month ethnography of middle-class Malaysian Chinese families to shed light on household cleaning practices. Drawing on practice theory, and responding to calls for explicit application and reporting of behaviour change research, this research demonstrates how cleaning practices are “locked in” by a system that promotes problematic practices in general. The findings explain why intensive cleaning practices emerged, uncovering a discourse of paranoia that leads to a culture of fear of a dangerous world. Paranoiac culture drives system behavior and market activities, resulting in the need to constantly (re-)negotiate the boundary between the “clean” and safe inside world and “dirty” and dangerous outside world through frequent, repeated, and meticulous cleaning.
Research Seminar Series (02/2021)
"Cultural Mobilities between Queer Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysia"
Speaker: Dr Ting-Fai Yu , Monash University Malaysia
Date: Wednesday, 24th March 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (academic matters).
Speaker’s Profile
Dr Ting-Fai Yu is a Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. He is an anthropologist and his research focuses on cultural identities in Chinese-speaking communities across East and Southeast Asia, with reference to questions of gender, sexuality, race, globalisation, and mobility. His most recent research can be found in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the Journal of Homosexuality, and Sexualities.
Abstract
While Taiwan has been widely regarded as Asia’s gay capital for lifestyle consumption especially by ethnic Chinese people overseas, it has rarely been studied as an exporter of queer discourses and movement tactics that is capable of influencing LGBT communities globally. Based on field research, this paper demonstrates how the formations of queer Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysia are historically connected and mutually productive. On the one hand, it argues that the queer development of Taiwan has significantly shaped LGBT people’s experiences and queer advocacy work in the other parts of the Chinese-speaking world such as and especially those in Malaysia. On the other, it highlights the ways in which Sinophone Malaysia is fundamentally transnational and distinctively queer, in comparison to other linguistic communities, as a result of its historical links to Taiwan.
Drawing on the scholarship on queer Sinophone cultures (e.g. Chiang and Wong 2020; Wei 2020) and media activism (e.g. Bao 2018, 2020), this paper explores two of the areas that have facilitated the cultural mobilities between queer Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysia: namely, Chinese language and digital media infrastructure. First, it demonstrates how the use of Chinese in queer Malaysian activist communities has enabled critical engagements with the happenings in Taiwan while serving an effective function of bypassing state scrutiny in illiberal settings. Second, it argues that the transnational circulation of Taiwan queer cultural texts has played a significant role in the production of queer Chinese Malaysians’ cross-cultural desires, in relation to the development of Malaysian new media, since the 2000s.
Research Seminar Series (01/2021)
"Debunking 'Sick Man of Asia': Negotiating Modern Chinese National Identity through Tourism"
Speaker: Dr I-Chieh Michelle Yang , Monash University Malaysia
Date: Tuesday, 2nd February 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Dr I-Chieh Michelle Yang joined Monash University Malaysia as a lecturer in Marketing in 2020 after receiving her PhD in Marketing from Monash University. Her research interest lies in consumer culture in Asia, politicized consumption and tourism marketing. Dr Yang is currently involved in research projects on the politicization of Asian cultural practices and national identity work. Her work has been published in top-ranked journals such as Annals of Tourism Research and Current Issues in Tourism, as well as international conferences such as Consumer Culture Theory Conference and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management Conference.
Abstract
This seminar explores the nexus between consumer culture and national identity in China. The rise of China and its economic prowess in recent decades have witnessed a phenomenal growth in Chinese outbound tourism. Specifically, the 21st century has seen China’s rise from its previous hardships to become one of the largest economies in the world. The “reform and opening” policy (gaige kaifang) inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 was aimed at opening China’s doors to foreign investments as well as international communications. Consumerism in China, too, has exponentially expanded, with strong demands for consumer goods and luxury products, making it the world’s largest consumer market. Nevertheless, China’s fall from centuries of imperialism to a series of foreign invasions, internal turmoil and current rising from its past hardships have resulted in a drastic national identity transformation in recent decades. For a collective society such as China, national identity serves as a cornerstone of a person’s sense of self and belonging. Unique to China’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, Gerth (2003) observes that consumer culture plays a potent role in China’s nation-making. Increasingly, China’s national identity and consumer culture serve as two parallel social forces that define each other. As Kuever (2018) notes, China remains an authoritarian and socialist regime with a paradoxically flourishing consumer culture. Chinese consumers increasingly recognize consumption as primary means to define themselves as citizens of a powerful and modern nation by consuming a continuum of products and services. Using international tourism as the consumption context, this research explores how Chinese citizens to negotiate their national identity through international tourism. A multi-method approach guided the data collection from 28 Chinese tourists in three ethnographic group tours. The findings revealed that international tourism offers a platform on which to affirm and express Chinese national identity through the symbolic interaction between Chinese tourists and the world outside of China.