fulbright Taiwan online journal

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Tag: Cultural Insights

Chris Upton: Rights and Rule-Crafting Processes in Taiwan’s Special Indigenous Courts

J. Christopher Upton’s research focuses on Taiwan’s newly created special indigenous courts. Chris conducted an in-depth ethnographic project concentrating on one of these courts, studying how the court crafted rules about indigenous customary practices and how indigenous litigants used the legal system to advance their own understandings of indigenous culture.  Chris Upton is a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. During his Fulbright research, Chris was hosted by Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan and the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung, Taiwan.

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Lillygol Sedaghat: The Glitter of Garbage: Taiwan’s Innovation in Waste Management

Lillygol Sedaghat documented Taiwan’s waste management system and innovations in plastics and electronics recycling through film and digital media. She hopes to inspire conscious consumerism – the realization that every choice we make affects the environment – and spark a global discussion on trash with the #MyWasteMyWay. Using music videos, info-graphics, and maps to promote environmental education, she aims to transform people’s perceptions of trash from something disposable to something valuable.  Although she began her research with limited vocabulary, she believed in the importance of using Chinese as the language of choice for her field work and worked hard to improve her Mandarin. While she is still working on finding her voice, she acknowledges that the journey is long, but definitely worth it. Lillygol Sedaghat is a multi-media environmental journalist and speaker focusing on the intersection among science, systems, and people. She is a 2017-18 Fulbright–National Geographic Digital Storyteller. She is an active contributor to National Geographic’s “Planet or Plastic?” global campaign. Lillygol has spoken at UN World Environment Day, Influence Nation Summit DC, and National Geographic on her research. She completed a B.A. in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley and was named 5 Under 25: Leaders

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Tricia Lin: Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, and Feminism

Inspired by the scholarly exchange and production of the indigenous knowledge in National Dong Hwa University, Tricia Lin spent her Fulbright year in the beautiful part of Taiwan, Hualien. She offered a course in postcolonial feminism and held several speeches on related issues. Not only did the given lectures caused large effects on the students and audiences, they also enriched her own teaching and writing. As a cross-cultural scholar, she saw that exchange of culture happens everywhere she went. A 17th-generation daughter of Taiwan, Yi-Chun Tricia Lin is Professor and Director of Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. She is former President of National Women’s Studies Association, 2012-2014. Her Fulbright work, titled Indigenous studies, gender studies, and feminism, is part and parcel of her book project on transnational Indigenous feminism.

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Reed Criddle: Performing Editions of Taiwanese Buddhist Chant

Is chanting a form of performance or a form of meditation? Through his five months Fulbright research in Taiwan, Dr. Reed Criddle would argue it is the later. Dr. Criddle visited Taiwan to study the Pure Land Mahayana Buddhism chants and aims to share them back in the United States and to the world. He is not only transcribing chants into Western musical notation, but he has also composed choral pieces for Western performance, based on his interpretations of the tradition. Dr. Reed Criddle is an Associate Professor in Department of Music at Utah Valley University, where his research is surrounding music and chanting. For 2017-18, he is a visiting researcher at Fo Guang Shan Institute of Humanistic Buddhism.

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Brian Skerratt: Orphans of the Earth: Ecological Crisis and Local Imagination in Contemporary Taiwanese Poetry

https://youtu.be/RkdFm9GMq4E   Lillygol Sedaghat documented Taiwan’s waste management system and innovations in plastics and electronics recycling through film and digital media. She hopes to inspire conscious consumerism – the realization that every choice we make affects the environment – and spark a global discussion on trash with the #MyWasteMyWay. Using music videos, info-graphics, and maps to promote environmental education, she aims to transform people’s perceptions of trash from something disposable to something valuable.  Although she began her research with limited vocabulary, she believed in the importance of using Chinese as the language of choice for her field work and worked hard to improve her Mandarin. While she is still working on finding her voice, she acknowledges that the journey is long, but definitely worth it. Lillygol Sedaghat is a multi-media environmental journalist and speaker focusing on the intersection among science, systems, and people. She is a 2017-18 Fulbright–National Geographic Digital Storyteller. She is an active contributor to National Geographic’s “Planet or Plastic?” global campaign. Lillygol has spoken at UN World Environment Day, Influence Nation Summit DC, and National Geographic on her research. She completed a B.A. in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley and was named 5 Under

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Pei-Lin Yu: Behavioral Ecology and the Evolution of Indigenous Taiwanese Farming

Modern Amis farmers retain traditional ecological knowledge of wild plants and ancient crops. This knowledge could boost the resiliency of Taiwan’s food systems in times of economic and climate change. Dr. Pei-Lin Yu, an Archaeology professor at Boise State University, has a Taiwanese father and an American mother. Dr. Yu has worked in public archaeology for 28 years and lived with hunter-gatherers in South America for 2 years. She is eager to explore Taiwan’s cultural diversity past and present.  

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Gina Elia: Shifting Concepts of Religion and Modernity in Republican-Era Chinese Literature

Gina Elia’s research focuses on the emergence of religious modernity during the Republican Era of the ROC. The literature of Bing Xin, Su Xuelin, and Su Dishan depicts characters who exhibit modern characteristics but traditional religious ideas. These authors believe that a religious mindset is necessary for a truly modern society, a distinctive approach to modernity. Gina Elia is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica for the 2016-2017 academic year.

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Karissa Chen: The Hundred-Mile Ditch, A novel

Karissa Chen’s reflects on several months of novel research on the stories of post-1949 migrants to Taiwan and related history. Karissa Chen is the author of “Of Birds and Lovers.” Her work has been published in numerous publications, including PEN America, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and The Toast. She is the Senior Literature Editor at Hyphen magazine, and a co-founding editor of Some Call It Ballin.

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A Unique Edition of Shishuo Xinyu

     My research is primarily concerned with texts produced and circulated in the early medieval period from roughly the second to the seventh centuries CE, or the period from the late Han dynasty through the beginning of the Tang dynasty. Warfare and political turmoil typically characterize the era in between these two powerful dynasties. Considered a complicated and unstable time, this time period also witnessed a period of great innovation in terms of literature, historiography, and scholarship. In the simplest terms, the quantity and variety of texts in circulation increased rapidly. Studying the way these and other texts were organized, then, is in part a way to understand how people dealt with this textual excess; the strategies that they used to cope with the ever increasing availability of accumulated textual knowledge is another important area to study. In addition, I am interested in the reception of these texts in later periods—works written to describe or evaluate the contents of these early medieval works, and what these newer texts tell us about how attitudes towards the older works shift over time. Usually it is not possible to consult editions of books that actually date from the early medieval period. Therefore,

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Research & Reflections

fulbright taiwan online journal