[ Women’s Human Rights Curriculum Development Workshop Series ]

Workshop 2  Feminist Understanding of Third World Diplomacy, Politics of Inter-Asia and Korea’s turn to Southeast Asia

[Date/Time] December 12, 2019; 16:00-18:00

[Venue] Asian Center for Women's Studies Meeting Hall (1st floor)

[Presentator] Shine Chio (School of People, Environment and Planing, Massey University)

Abstract:

This paper interrogates two related bodies of research paradigm – Third World diplomacy coming out of history and political science, and the Inter-Asia project which while appearing more diverse in disciplinary terms has distinct boundaries. I do this work from and for feminist postcolonial perspective and politics using my preliminary fieldwork in Cambodia and Malaysia as well as in Africa (Senegal, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia) on North Korean cultural diplomacy. I say ‘preliminary’ because the fieldwork has been as much about formulating methods questions and praxis in doing inter-regional research given the dearth of research in connecting ‘unlikely’ regions and fields of politics. My fieldwork was driven by this premise: while Korean studies scholarship in both Korean and in English offer increasingly complex pictures of North Korea, even this new development including my own early work is constrained by prevailing Cold War and post Cold War narratives. As a community of scholars studying divided Korea, we are failing to provide alternatives to conventional Eurocentric and ideologically-constrained explanations that assume the anti-imperial, socialist North Korean experiment was bound to fail and become anachronistic and corrupt.

Program

16:00-16:50  [Presentation]  Feminist Understanding of Third World Diplomacy, Politics of Inter-Asia, and Korea’s turn to Southeast Asia 

16:50-17:00  [Break]

17:00-17:40    [Workshop: Discussion/Demonstration]

17:40-18:00  [Q&A and Closing]