CKS Fall 2020 Events

Thursday, December 3 (4:00 p.m.)
[Zoom Talk] Book Talk: One Left by Kim Soom
Bruce Fulton (University of British Columbia) & Ju-Chan Fulton (Translator)
Location: Online via Zoom

Summary: During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in horrific conditions in “comfort stations” across Japanese-occupied territories. Barely 10 percent survived to return to Korea, where they lived as social outcasts. Since then, self-declared comfort women have come forward only to have their testimonies and calls for compensation largely denied by the Japanese government.

Kim Soom tells the story of a woman who was kidnapped at the age of thirteen while gathering snails for her starving family. The horrors of her life as a sex slave follow her back to Korea, where she lives in isolation gripped by the fear that her past will be discovered. Yet, when she learns that the last known comfort woman is dying, she decides to tell her there will still be “one left” after her passing, and embarks on a painful journey.

One Left is a provocative, extensively researched novel constructed from the testimonies of dozens of comfort women. The first Korean novel devoted to this subject, it rekindled conversations about comfort women as well as the violent legacies of Japanese colonialism. This first-ever English translation recovers the overlooked and disavowed stories of Korea’s most marginalized women.

Bio: Kim Soom is the prize-winning author of six story collections and nine novels. One Left is her first novel translated into English.

Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton have received awards and critical acclaim for their translations of Korean fiction, including Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers.

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Monday, November 30 (10:00 a.m.)
Nuclear (In)Security: The Korean Peninsula and U.S. Foreign Policy
Location: Virtual Event
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of International Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies

Speaker/s: Jeffrey Lewis, Monterey Institute of International Studies; Harold Smith, Nuclear Engineering, UC Berkeley; Jinyoung Park, Consulate of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco
Moderator: Daniel Sargent, Dr., Institute of International Studies UC Berkeley

Summary: Please join us for a panel discussion on the North Korean nuclear program and the options available to the international community and the incoming U.S. administration. Korea was the venue for some of Donald Trump's most dramatic foreign policy initiatives. Summit meetings between the outgoing U.S. president and Kim Jong Un created a diplomatic theater—but did not succeed in containing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The Korean Peninsula remains a fissile strategic theater—and an urgent priority for the incoming administration of the U.S. President-elect Joe Biden.
What can be done to contain and manage North Korea’s nuclear ambitions? Should the United States revert to the multilateralist approaches that earlier administrations have favored? Or should President Biden sustain the bilateral dialogue that President Trump began? What are the prospects for a diplomatic breakthrough? And what are the technical challenges—involving monitoring and verification—that would accompany any North Korean nuclear deal?

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Wednesday, November 18 (4:00 p.m.)
[Zoom Talk] Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea
Sonja Kim, Binghamton University
Location: Online via Zoom

Summary: In 1899, a woman’s application to the newly established Taehan Korean government’s medical school was denied. By 1945, women’s professional health work had become a permanent part of Korea’s landscape. This talk outlines this transformation, examining the intimate connections between public health initiatives and gendered imperatives that produced novel organization of women’s labor, education, and health care in hospitals, schools, and the home. Individual women met challenges posed by uneven developments in medicine, intervened in practices aimed at them as caregivers and recipients, and seized the evolving options that became available to promote their personal, familial, and professional interests.

Bio: Sonja M. Kim is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University, the State University of New York. The author of Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea, she holds research interests on gender, health, and welfare in Korea and its diasporic communities.

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Thursday, October 22 (4:00 p.m.)
[Zoom Talk] Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea
David Fedman, University of California, Irvine
Location: Online via Zoom

Summary: This talk will briefly introduce some of the key arguments and interventions that animate Seeds of Control, one of the first English-language studies of the environmental impacts and legacies of Japan's occupation of Korea. By outlining some of the central themes of the book, the author hopes to stimulate a broader conversation about forest governance and colonial power, as well as the growth of Korean environmental history as a field.

Bio: David Fedman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020). His other publications include "The Ondol Problem and the Politics of Forest Conservation in Colonial Korea" (Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 23, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Joel A. Tarr Envirotech Article Prize.

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Thursday, October 8 (4:00 p.m.)
[Zoom Talk] Fantasies of Modernity: South Korean Television and Latin America
Benjamin Han, Tulane University
Location: Online via Zoom
Co-Sponsor/s: Center for Latin American Studies

Summary: Since 1905, the everyday interactions of the Korean diaspora with Latin Americans have shaped the representation of Korea in Latin America. In 1905, a ship carrying approximately 1,033 Korean laborers left the port of Incheon for Mexico, making its arrival in Yucatán. Koreans have then (re)migrated and dispersed across different parts of Latin America, including Cuba, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. As Korean immigrants gained socioeconomic status as successful entrepreneurs, Latin America began to integrate them into their cultural productions, including literature and television. While Korea in the Latin American cultural imaginary is embedded in Orientalist tropes, there has been growing visibility of Latin America in contemporary Korean television. This talk examines how different television genres, such as reality TV, drama, and travel documentary, articulate distinctive ways of imagining Korean-Latin American relations to strengthen the image of global Korea and legitimize the transcultural power of the Korean Wave.

Bio: Benjamin Han is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. He is the author of Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a book that examines the representation of Latin America in South Korean television.

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Webinar Series - Aging in Asia: Ethical and Policy Issues in Healthy Aging and End of Life Care Across the Asia-Pacific Region

Wednesday, September 9 (6:00 p.m.)
Wednesday, September 16 (6:00 p.m.)
Wednesday, September 23 (6:00 p.m.)

Location: Online - Webinar
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), School of Public Health, National Taiwan University Institute of Health Behaviors and Community Sciences, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Health Research for Action, Department of Ethnic Studies

Summary: With aging populations and dwindling birth rates in many developed countries. healthy aging and end of life care are becoming an increasing challenge. A multidisciplinary approach by scholars from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, China, Mongolia, and the U.S. addresses these issues and discuss leading aging policy developments across the Pacific. Speakers explore ethical issues, initiatives to address the emerging global aging crisis, and ultimately seek to build a regional network among scholars and practitioners across Asia and the United States.

Each of the three webinar sessions, to be held online on September 9, 16, and 23, will deal with a different region of Asia. The webinar program, containing the agenda, abstracts, and brief biographical statements of the speakers, can be downloaded from this website.

"Aging in Asia" is organized jointly by Winston Tseng of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Health Research for Action, and Department of Ethnic Studies Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies Program; Duan-Rung Chen, National Taiwan University College of Public Health Institute of Health Behaviors and Community Sciences; and the UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies.