Research Focus Group Conference: China Rising

On May 2 and 3, UC Santa Barbara is hosting a group of scholars, Ford Foundation project officers, film makers and movement leaders on campus.

This group from China, Brazil and Ecuador offers novel “southern” or subaltern perspectives on China’s massive contemporary presence in Africa, Middle East and Latin America. This process of Chinese engagement across the continents of the global south may represent one of the most significant global-scale transformations of our era, challenging us to think differently about south-south relations, environmental politics, area studies, history, geopolitics, and social change. This group of visitors to our campus utilize lenses of gender, sexuality and race to address these questions of culture, infrastructure and globalization to contextualize “China Rising” or “China Stepping out into the World.”

‘CHINA RISING’ CONFERENCE INAUGURAL EVENT

3pm-7pm: THURSDAY, May 2^nd:  Multicultural Center Theater: 

3pm: SCREENING OF FILM: “Wolf Warrior II” – This 2017 action film traces the adventures of a charismatic ex-soldier from China as he journeys through Africa struggling with mercenaries, pirates and insurgents, to rescue Chinese factory workers and African children. The film was a massive global blockbuster that earned more at the box office than any other film in Chinese history. Although jingoistic and nationalist on its surface, the film reveals complexities of gender, race, imperialism, capitalism and sexuality, as well as military industries, container shipping economies, and medical-humanitarian logics.

5pm:  KEYNOTE TALK:  Dr. Petrus Liu, Boston University. “Rethinking Gender/Sexuality through the Cultural Politics of China Rising.”  Prof. Liu is the author of Stateless Subjects (2011) and Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (2015).

6pm: PANEL ROUNDTABLE: “China Rising: Transregional Research and Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, Race, Infrastructure and Culture,” featuring Paul Amar (UCSB), Lisa Rofel (UCSC), Cai Yiping (DAWN, Beijing), Petrus Lui (Boston University), Huang Yingying (Renmin University, Beijing), He Xiaopei (Pink Space Beijing), Laura Waisbich (Articulação Sul, Brazil, and Cambridge University), Maria Amelia Viteri Burbano (USF de Quito, Ecuador)

1pm: FRIDAY, May 3^rd: HSSB 6020: OPEN Student Researcher Workshop

1pm: Student Researcher Workshop, beginning with screening of a short film by He Xiaopei, “Our Marriages: Lesbians Marry Gay Men,” and discussion with the film’s director about mixing research, film and public engagement.

2pm: MENTORING and GRANT-WRITING WORKSHOP.  Graduate students are invited to present abstracts of their research. Advanced undergrads are also invited to present brief summaries of their research interests.  Our international guest scholars will engage with the students and offer mentorship in terms of researching transregionally (China, Americas, Africa, Middle East) and intersectionally (gender, sexuality, race, coloniality). Guests will offer advice about grant writing and fellowship applications.

3pm. Friday, May 3^rd:  HSSB 6020: FACULTY ROUNDTABLE

3pm: Faculty Roundtable: “Global, Area Studies and Comparative Studies and Transregional China”

UCSB Dean of Social Sciences Prof. Charles Hale will lead a discussion between the guest researchers, and UCSB specialists in Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, African Studies and Global Studies, to articulate new methods and agendas for area/global studies and for engaged research in all disciplines, grappling with the dilemmas of south-south relations and China’s “stepping out” into the world.

This series of events and conferences has been organized by Prof. Paul Amar (Global Studies Department, UCSB), and by Prof. Lisa Rofel (Center for Emerging Worlds, UCSC), with generous support from the Ford Foundation and the UCSB Multicultural Center and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s New Sexualities Research Focus Group.