AP Forum: Student Summer Research (Fall 2024—Session 2)

Each semester, APSI organizes several events under the banner of our Asia-Pacific Forum. These informal sessions are opportunities for students, faculty, and members of our community to gather and discuss topics of interest, including research projects and opportunities.

At this event, three of our returning students will share findings from their summer research:

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Maako Shiratori—“Audibilities in Two Homes: Yaizu Folk Song and Jappalachian Tokyo”

As an ethnomusicologist, I revisited two of my hometowns in Japan to conduct oral history interviews and a lecture-concert with other “Jappalachian” musicians. Tokyo-Ryogoku Folklore Center invited me to provide a talk and Appalachian Old-Time fiddle performance, featuring music and folktales from Beech Mountain, NC. After the concert, fifteen audience members, including pioneering Jappalachian musicians, shared their experiences of Jappalachian connections since the 1950s. At Lafcadio Hearn Memoriam Museum in Yaizu, an archivist-scholar, Ayako Nasuno, and female dancer-singers of Yaizu Minyo-Minbu Kyokai allowed me to record their folk song, Yaizu-Odori (pub. 1952), and narratives related to my grandmother. The song and stories from Yaizu and Tokyo demonstrate complex audibilities of the Japanese narrator-musicians, entangled with the history of the Japan-US relationship, especially after the Pacific War. This fieldwork engaged my research networks and strengthened the foundation of my dissertation project that bridges Japanese and Appalachian tradition.

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Lucy Right—“Multi-Party Governance under Single-Party Rule?: The Curious Case of Cambodia's Commune Councils”

Over the last decade, the Cambodian government under the control of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), has responded to growing support for the opposition with a series of autocratic measures that, by circumscribing the rights of the opposition party and its representatives, have aimed to eliminate the threat of electoral competition while maintaining the facade of multi-party politics. Following the disqualification of opposition candidates from national elections in 2023, but not from local elections in 2022, Cambodian politics today is characterized by a bizarre contradiction, in which multi-party local governance persists within a system of single-party rule. In this presentation, I offer evidence of how national party and civil society elites conceptualize the role of the opposition in local politics today and discuss what levers exist (if any) to hold local government officials accountable under these unique conditions. My talk will also touch on the challenges and surprises of conducting research with political elites in an autocratic setting.

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Hechen Liu—“Ideal Socialist Man, Workers, Minerals, and Plants: Wastization and Ecological Assemblages of Wastes in Fushun, China”

This paper studies the interconnections between socialism, precarity, and environmental degradation in post-socialist China by analyzing ecological assemblages of waste in Fushun, a once-thriving industrial city but now in decline. Through an examination of the works of Fushun-based photographer Li Yong, including “Daily Scenery” (2007–2016) and “11.44km²” (2019–2020), I analyze four distinct forms of waste: the ‘ideal socialist person,’ coal gangue, laid-off workers, and vegetation. These diverse forms of waste are often dismissed as separate entities, yet they form complex ecological assemblages within polluted landscapes. Li’s photographic practice critically reveals this marginalization by documenting how humans, minerals, and plants co-exist and adapt within wastelands. His works not only examine the material and social degradation resulting from state-induced policies but also reframe waste as a dynamic process—wastization—whereby human inferiority is politically installed and resources are stripped of value. This paper argues that Li’s work critiques the linear temporality of modern neoliberalism and challenges the traditional narratives of waste by foregrounding the symbiotic relationships within Fushun’s toxic landscape.

Lunch will be provided to registered participants.