Isabelle Cheng and Lara Momesso, CRaB members who specialise in migration in East Asia, have been awarded a total of €20,775 for organising an international conference entitled ‘Rethinking Transnationalism in the Global World: Contested State, Society, Border and People in between’ on 7-8 September 2017 at the University of Portsmouth.
Attended by scholars from the UK, US, Germany, Japan, Macao, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, and Taiwan, this conference aims at enhancing the theorisation of transnationalism with reference to the rich experiences of Taiwan as a migration hub in East Asia. The conference will investigate transnati
onalism in four panels: sovereignty and human rights, infusion of capital, idea and culture, intimacy and negotiation of identity at home, and activism at grassroots level and across borders. Professor Brenda Yeoh, the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore, will deliver the keynote speech entitled ‘Negotiating Intimacies across Borders: Time, Temporalities and Transnational Families’. This conference will also host the very first overseas screening of ‘See You, Lovable Strangers’, a documentary about undocumented Vietnamese migrant workers who ‘run away’ and find employment in agricultural work in the central ridge of Taiwan.
This conference receives generous support from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CCKF), a world-known funding agency supporting China and Taiwan Studies. The award shows CCKF’s recognition of the significance of the project as well as the participants’ expertise. Details of the conference programme will be available soon. Please join us in our exploration of how ordinary men and women can make a difference to their life when it is constrained by global economy, state institutions, popular discourses and familial hierarchy.