Part One: History and Positionality

2/18 Week 1: Asia as connected places

• Jesook Song; Positioning Asia in a Global Future? An Example through Rethinking Finance. positions 1 February 2012; 20 (1): 173–182. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1471418

Supplementary readings:

• Tagliacozzo, Eric, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue. Introduction in Asia Inside Out: Connected Places / Edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, Peter C. Perdue. Ed. Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University Press, 2015. 

2/25 Week 2: Why Taiwan?

• Lin, Wei-Ping. Chapter 10 in Island Fantasia: Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between China and Taiwan, 2021.


• Dirlik, Arif. 2018. “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made.” Boundary 2 45 (3): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-6915545.

Supplementary readings:

• Island in Between.

3/4 Week 3: Global Imagination

• Allison, Anne. Millennial monsters: Japanese toys and the global imagination. University of California Press, 2006.


• Teri J. Silvio. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. University of Hawaii Press, 2019.

Part Two: Subject and Media 

3/11 Week 4: Sound and Noise

• Hsieh, Jennifer C. “Making Noise in Urban Taiwan.” American Ethnologist 48, no. 1 (2021): 51–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13003.


• Tan, S., L. Ó. Briain, and M. Y. Ong. "Narrowcasting into the infinite margins: internet sonorities of transient Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore." Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific: Music, Media, and Technology (2021): 49-70.

Supplementary readings:

• The Sound and the Theory: A Conversation with Anthropology Assistant Professor Jennifer Hsieh 


• Sounds of Precarious Labour


• Manabe, Noriko. 2015. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.


• Rumsby, C. (2020). ‘Retrospective (re)presentation: turning the written ethnographic text into an ‘ethno-graphic’’ entanglements, 3(2):7-27. 

Ethnographic Practice #1

3/18 Week 5: Pop Culture

• Kim, Suk-Young. K-pop live: Fans, idols, and multimedia performance. Stanford University Press, 2020.


• Kim, Ju Oak. "BTS as method: A counter-hegemonic culture in the network society." Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 6 (2021): 1061-1077.

Supplementary readings:

• Phillips, Kathryn, and Thomas Baudinette. "Shin-Ōkubo as a feminine ‘K-pop space’: gendering the geography of consumption of K-pop in Japan." Gender, Place & Culture 29, no. 1 (2022): 80-103.


• Fuhr, Michael. Globalization and popular music in South Korea: Sounding out K-pop. Routledge, 2015.


• Cruz, Angela Gracia B., Yuri Seo, and Itir Binay. "Cultural globalization from the periphery: Translation practices of English-speaking K-pop fans." Journal of Consumer Culture 21, no. 3 (2021): 638-659. 

Media Reflection Proposal due

3/25 Week 6: Algorithms

• Prologue, Chapter 6, and epilogue in Seaver, Nick. Computing taste: algorithms and the makers of music recommendation. University of Chicago Press, 2022.


• Bhandari, Aparajita, and Sara Bimo. "Why’s everyone on TikTok now? The algorithmized self and the future of self-making on social media." Social media+ society 8, no. 1 (2022): 20563051221086241.


• Seaver, Nick. "Attention Is All You Need: Humans and Computers in the Time of Neural Networks." In Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses, pp. 230-248. Columbia University Press, 2023.

Supplementary readings:

• Pedersen, Morten Axel, Kristoffer Albris, and Nick Seaver. "The political economy of attention." Annual Review of Anthropology 50 (2021): 309-325.


• Boyer, Dominic. 2013. The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era. Expertise. Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press.


• Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip, eds. 2021. Your Computer Is on Fire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Ethnographic Practice #2

Part Three: Structure 

4/1 Week 7: Precarity

• Song, Jesook. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: the Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. Durham N.C: Duke University Press, 2009.


• Cho, Mun Young. "The precariat that can speak: The politics of encounters between the educated youth and the urban poor in Seoul." Current Anthropology 63, no. 5 (2022): 491-518.

Supplementary readings:

• Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London, UK; New York, NY: Bloomsbury.


• Kar, Sohini. Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.


• Koch, Gabriele. Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.


• Guérin, Isabelle, Santosh Kumar, and Govindan Venkatasubramanian. The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2023.


• Allison, Anne. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.

4/8 Week 8: Inequality 

• Chan, Jenny, Mark Selden, and Ngai Pun. 2020. Preface in Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers. Haymarket Books.


• Duffy, Brooke Erin, Annika Pinch, Shruti Sannon, and Megan Sawey. 2021. ‘The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media.’ Social Media + Society 7(2): 1–12.


• 人物，2020。“外卖骑手，困在系统里.” February 18, 2021. https://bit.ly/2OmfJMI English: https://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/

Supplementary readings:

• Ngai, Pun, and Jenny Chan. 2012. “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience.” Modern China 38 (4): 383–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700412447164.


• Rao, Yichen. "Dreaming like a market: The hidden script of financial inclusion in China's P2P lending platforms." Economic Anthropology 8, no. 1 (2021): 102-115.


• Cho, Mun Young. 2013. The Specter of the People: Urban Poverty in Northeast China. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.


• Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India.

4/15 Week 9: Unrest

• Chuang, Ya-Chung. 2018. “Democracy under Siege: Xiangmin Politics in Sunflower Taiwan.” Boundary 2 45 (3): 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-6915581.


• Sopranzetti, Claudio. Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018.

Supplementary readings:

• Ogawa, Akihiro. Antinuclear Citizens: Sustainability Policy and Grassroots Activism in Post-Fukushima Japan. Stanford University Press, 2023.


• Lee, Doreen. Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.


• Spires, Anthony J. Everyday Democracy: Civil Society, Youth, and the Struggle Against Authoritarian Culture in China. Columbia University Press, 2024. https://www.ncuscr.org/video/everyday-democracy-anthony-spires/

Media Reflection Paper Due

Part Four: Difference

4/22 Week 10: Encounters

• Mathews, Gordon. Chapter 3. The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.


• Kwon, June Hee. Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers. Duke University Press, 2023.

Supplementary readings:

• Mathews, Gordon. Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.


• Byler, Darren. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.


• Franceschini, Ivan, and Nicholas Loubere. 2022. “Global China as Method.” Elements in Global China, July. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472.


• Siu, Helen F., and Mike McGovern. 2017. “China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (1).

Ethnographic Practice #3

4/29 Week 11: Innovation

• Silvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020).


• Bender, Shawn. Feeling Machines: Japanese Robotics and the Global Entanglements of More-Than-Human Care. Stanford University Press, 2024.

Supplementary readings:

• Postill, John. "The rise of nerd politics." Digital activism and political change. John Postill. London: PlutoPress (Anthropology, culture & society) (2018). https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745399836/the-rise-of-nerd-politics/ 

Final Project Proposal Due

5/6 Week 12: Race

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Yu-kuei Sun

• Sun, D. Y.-K. (2022). Racialized Bodies in Sports: Articulating ‘Asian Physical Inferiority’ in Contemporary Taiwan. In T.-H. Chen, Y. Chiang, & A. Bairner (eds.), Sport in Taiwan: History, culture and policy. Peter Lang.


• Mwaniki, M. (2017). The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports. U of Nebraska Press.

Part Five: Perception and Post-humanism

5/13 Week 13: Anthropocene

• Roberts, Celia, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Louisa Allen, and Rebecca Williamson. Reproduction, kin, and climate crisis: Making bushfire babies. Policy Press, 2023.


• Simon, Scott E., and Frédéric Laugrand, eds. Feathered Entanglements: Human-Bird Relations in the Anthropocene. UBC Press, 2024.

Ethnographic Practice #4

5/20 Week 14: Travel Seminar (optional)

5/27 Week 15: Forms of Life 

• Li, Tania Murray, and Pujo Semedi. Plantation life: corporate occupation in Indonesia's oil palm zone. Duke University Press, 2021.


• Morimoto, Ryo. Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone. Vol. 56. Univ of California Press, 2023.

Supplementary readings:

• Cheng, Eric Siu-kei. "The mobile spatialization of agriculture in Hong Kong." Journal of Rural Studies 106 (2024): 103208.


• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Lukas Ley. 2021. Building on Borrowed Time: rising seas and failing infrastructure in Semarang. University of Minnesota Press. 


• Kimura, Aya Hirata. Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after the Fukushima. Duke Ebooks. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

6/3 Week 16: Project report. No class.

6/10 Week 17: Final presentation.

6/17 Week 18: Final project submission. No class. 

TBD

Weekly Participation 30 pts.

• Weekly Attendance (15 pts.)


• Weekly Discussion Questions (15 pts.)

Based on your reading of the assigned texts, submit a discussion question (50-150 words) each week by 12 pm on the Monday before the class.

Short ethnographic practices 20 pts

Media Reflection Essay  20 pts

Final Project  30 pts.