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February 25, 2020

Mar 3 – Public and Private Health Care in Phnom Penh

Pressure and freedom: Technology and formations of public and private health care in Phnom Penh

Jenna Grant, Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology, University of Washington

March 3, 2020 Tuesday, 4:00 pm Knight Library Browsing Room

Free market and democracy talk were very much in the air in Cambodia of the early 2010s. On the Medical Imaging Ward, doctors and medical students explained the contemporary by means of a contrast: “Because now, we have a free market.” “Because now, we can choose.” They were signaling the logic and affect of dramatic changes in the organization of economy and society since the end of the socialist period (1989-). In this talk, I explore how medical imaging participates in the re-configuration of public and private health care in Phnom Penh. I consider different concepts to help parse the organization of care when Cambodia’s political economy evades captions such as “socialism” or “free market capitalism.” There is the “post-political”, there is the “neopatrimonial”, both useful but not exclusive in their description of the way care and value flow in public and private spheres. Diagnostic services are the first green shoots of private practice. They are an easy entry into the health care market because they do not require much capital, and labour costs are low. Staying close to material practices of buying, selling, regulating, scanning, and diagnosing, we can see how imaging technologies, particularly ultrasound, shape the health care field. Care is configured with other regimes of value, such as real estate and land, through logics of speculation, pressure, and what one public health researcher called, “freedom.”

 

Sponsored by the University of Oregon’s Asian Studies Program and the College of Arts & Sciences in coordination with the Department of Anthropology

 

 

 

January 22, 2020

“The river grew tired of us: Spectral flows along the Mekong

Join Andrew Johnson, visiting fellow at Cornell University on Wednesday, January 29, when he speaks on his research. This speaker series, “Religion in Our World” is sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Oregon Humanities Center.

October 2, 2018

Hyeong-ki Kwon, Visiting Scholar 2018-19

Hyeong-ki Kwon, currently a Visiting Scholar of Asian Studies at the University of Oregon, is a professor of Political Science at Seoul National University. His research interests are in changes of national economies in the course of globalization, including the U.S., Germany, Japan, Ireland, and Korea. His publications in comparative politics include Fairness and Division of Labor in Market Societies (2004) and articles in major journals including Comparative Political Studies, Politics & Society, Theory and Society, Comparative European Politics, Contemporary Politics, and Economic and Industrial Democracy.

Recently, he has studied the evolution of Korean capitalism. Korea has rapidly industrialized and grown from one of poorest countries to an advanced country. Its economic development has prevalently accounted by so-called developmental state theory. However, since the Asian financial crisis of 1997, it has been liberalized. He studies to what extent its political economic system has changed and what makes its political economy distinctive—continuation of state capitalism—from a comparative perspective in globalization.

Welcome Professor Hyeong-ki Kwon!

October 13, 2017

Eclipsed Cinema – Dong Hoon Kim

Dong Hoon Kim, Assistant Professor of Korean Film, Literature, and Cultural Studies, has written a book, “Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea.” Kim’s work is ground-breaking, in that it investigates film culture of the early 20th century (1910-1945), which has not been widely studied or written about. Korea’s rule by Japan began at the end of the Korean Empire in 1910 and ended at the conclusion of World War II, in 1945, when U.S. and the U.S.S.R. captured the Korean peninsula.

Kim brings new perspectives to the nexus of colonialism, modernity, film historiography and national cinema that resulted in U.S./Russian rule. The result is the reconstruction of the lost intricacies of colonial film history, which is difficult to document. He examines the politics of colonial cinema, the colonial government’s own film-making unit, Hollywood’s reception to Korean cinema, in relation to the emerging Korean nationalism, the culture of Japanese settlers, and gendered film spectatorship. This book fills a significant void in Asian film history.

September 29, 2017

Professor Lamia Karim received a small grant of $1000 from Asian Studies to conduct research on labor practices in the global ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh in 2016.

The support from Asian Studies helped Karim to collect data on trade union activities in Bangladesh and to locate it within the broader context of labor rights and unions activities comparatively in the Asian context.

Karim is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Becoming Labor: Female Workers in the Readymade Garment Industry in Bangladesh.” During 2016-17, Professor Karim was a Fellow at the research center Perspectives on Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

July 20, 2017

The Edge of Knowing

Asian Studies affiliated faculty member Roy Bing Chan’s new book, “The Edge of Knowing,” explores the relationship between the rhetoric of dreams and realist literary practice in modern Chinese literature. Chan focuses this book from the May Fourth Era in the early 20th century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

Chan’s attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation-building.

Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing seeks to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.

Chan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in East Asian Languages and Literatures, here at the University of Oregon.

December 19, 2016

Vietnam’s Communist Revolution

Asian Studies Director Tuong Vu’s new book, “Vietnam’s Communist Revolution,” was recently published by Cambridge University Press.
tuong-book-communist-revolution

The book traces the evolving worldview of Vietnamese communists over 80 years as they led Vietnam through wars, social revolution, and peaceful development.

Spanning the entire history of the Vietnamese revolution and its aftermath, this book examines its leaders’ early rise to power, the tumult of three decades of war with France, the US, and China, and the stubborn legacies left behind which remain in Vietnam today.

Peter Zinoman, of the University of California-Berkeley, calls the book a “game changer in multiple fields.” He says it is the “first study in over a generation to cover the entire century-long history of the Vietnamese communist party from its inception after World War I until the present.”

November 29, 2016

Alisa Freedman – Winner – Faculty Advisor 2017

Dr. Alisa Freedman, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film, has been awarded Winner of the region 8 Excellence in Advising – Faculty Advisor 2017.

alisa-freedmansmall

This recognition comes from the NACADA Annual Awards Program for Academic Advising, and honors individuals and institutions making significant contributions to the improvement of academic advising. NACADA is a representative and advocate of academic advising and those providing that service to higher education. Congratulations Alisa!

 

May 26, 2016

Alisa Freedman – Excellence Award

Asian Studies/EALL Professor Alisa Freedman (standing, in striped dress) has been awarded one of the two 2016 University of Oregon Excellence in Undergraduate Advising Awards by the Division of Undergraduate Studies and the All-Campus Advising Association (ACAA).Advising Ceremony Tablecropped

The awards committee received close to 200 nominations and 51 applications from 30 different departments for review, making this award a significant recognition for Professor Freedman as a teacher, advisor, and mentor for our students.

Working Futures: Perspectives on Labor from the Global South

Working Futures Workshop

Working Futures: Perspectives on
Labor from the Global South
Carla Freeman,Emory University
Lamia Karim, University of Oregon
Ching Kwan, Lee University of California, Los Angeles
Eileen Otis, University of Oregon
Friday, May 27, 2016
Browsing Room, Knight Library
10:00-noon

 

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