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Wednesday, February 16, 2022
3:00 - 5:00 PM Eastern Time
This webinar, the first in the three-part series of Academics Online events, will offer lightning talks by scholars of China, Japan, India, and Hong Kong, with the aim of building knowledge and awareness of critical issues surrounding public-facing scholarship, activism, and online harassment in Asian Studies. Over the last several years, virtual spaces have become a significant site of misinformation, disinformation, and mobilization among extremist communities. Internet-based activism and political mobilization are not a new phenomenon; yet, alarmingly, in much of the world, right wing populists, conspiracy theorists, history deniers and the like have been invigorated by the possibilities of connecting online and have grown in size and strength. Many such actors have turned the internet into a battle ground, engaging not only in recruiting and radicalizing supporters but also in campaigns of harassment of their opponents. Asia has been a particularly important venue for the growth of this phenomenon, and online harassment has been a growing problem that regularly impacts researchers and activists who become targets of those who oppose their political and scholarly stances. Despite the imminent personal and professional threats such campaigns pose not only to academic freedom at large but also to the safety of our colleagues and allies, conversations about how, where, and why these movements are occurring across the globe, and across Asias in particular, have been slow to begin. This event will be one starting point for these discussions.

Session Panelists
  Michael Berry 
Author and editor of several books on Chinese film and culture; Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film at University of California, Los Angeles.
  Paula R. Curtis
Historian of medieval Japan and presently a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History with the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at University of California, Los Angeles.
  Mary Gallagher
Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization and Human Rights at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the International Institute.
  Jeffrey J. Hall
Lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba, Japan. 
  Nitasha Kaul
Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster
  Lillian Ngan
Ph.D. student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California.
  Audrey Truschke
Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.
  Helena Wu
Assistant Professor of Hong Kong Studies at the University of British Columbia
  Tomomi Yamaguchi
Associate Professor of Anthropology and the director of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Minor at Montana State University.

Sponsoring Institutions
Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA

Association for Asian Studies

Center for Chinese Studies, UCLA

Center for Korean Studies, UCLA

Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education (CARE)

The Haruhisa Handa Professorship of Shinto Studies, UCLA

Japanese Arts & Globalizations Group, UCLA

Terasaki Center for Japanese Language Studies, UCLA

Verge: Studies in Global Asias and the Global Asias Initiative (GAI), The Pennsylvania State University