Inter-Asia Seminar Series: Cold War and Asia Modernity
While many today use Cold War 2.0 to refer to the standoff between U.S. and China, it is worth remembering that the first Cold War never ended in Asia, as evidenced by the political situation on the Korean Peninsula and that surrounding the Taiwan Strait. How has Cold War figured into the (controversial) modernisation process of East and Southeast Asia as well as the various (critical) imaginaries of modernity across the regions? As discussions of decolonisation often predicate on the dichotomy of global North vs. global South, how should scholars of Asia position themselves in their conscious effort to reconfigure knowledge production?
This event will take place online via Zoom. Register to attend the event online here.
Speakers:
Dr Seung-Ook Lee: Associate professor at the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), specializes in urban and political geography with a focus on the geopolitical economy in East Asia, particularly in China and on the Korean peninsula. As a joint researcher at the Center for Asian Cities and Society at Seoul National University, he has conducted research on Special Economic Zones and military base cities in East Asia. Recently, he has been collaborating with urban planning experts on a project titled “A New Land of Opportunity in the Post-Pandemic Era: Spatial Inequality of Opportunity,” aimed at diagnosing and exploring alternatives to urban inequality across South Korean cities.
Professor Nianshen Song: Professor at the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (TIAS) at Tsinghua University, China. He specializes in modern Chinese and East Asian histories, frontier and ethnicities, and global history. Prof. Song holds a PhD in History from the University of Chicago and an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics (LSE). He has published Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcations, 1881-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Faxian Dongya (Discovery East Asia, New Star Press, 2018), in addition to numerous journal articles in both English and Chinese.
Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen: Worked at the UN Development Programme in Indonesia and East Timor (2019-2022) and the UN Economic and Social Commission for the Asia-Pacific in Thailand (2016-2017) on survey data collection and analysis, rural economic development, peacebuilding, and trade policy. She has intimate experience with the UN-led post-war reconciliation efforts between Indonesia and East Timor following the latter’s independence referendum in 1999 and has published on the topic. Her other research interests are found in the intersections of global history, historical sociology, and comparative politics, especially on the 20th century Cold War and revolutions in Vietnam and communist Asia; the enduring influence of such memories, emotions, and legacies on Vietnam’s contemporary and future political trajectories from a “history from below” perspective; the subjectivity and sense of citizenship from (post)revolutionary livelihoods, experience, and participation; and the rise and fall of socialist internationalism in Vietnam’s changing imaginaries of modernity and its place in the world.
Chair:
Professor Hyun Bang Shin: Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and also Head of Department in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and was formerly Director of Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, LSE. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of urbanisation with particular attention to Asian cities, covering such themes as gentrification, politics of displacement, speculative urbanisation and mega-projects. His most recent projects on circulating urbanism and Asian capital involved field research in Quito, Manila, Iskandar Malaysia, Kuwait City and London.