fulbright Taiwan online journal

Tag: research

Paul Ocampo: Advancing Body-Mind Relationship in Dance Technique

Can “Tai Chi” mix with dance? Is training from a dance academy the only way? Through his Fulbright exchange, Paul Ocampo shows us that dancers from different generations and cultures can build and share knowledge through the arts. Paul Ocampo is a dancer and an adjunct lecturer at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He came to Taiwan to teach dance techniques and the incorporation of body-mind awareness. This video features his reflections on the relationship between Paul and his students and on his personal experiences about the use of breath and the flow of movement.

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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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Lynn Nakazawa & Elie Yu: Teacher Training & Research with Fulbright Taiwan

Lynn Nakazawa and Elie Yu work within the ETA advisory team which provides training and advice to the English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) and Taiwan local English teachers (LETs). Through weekly reports, bi-weekly workshops, class observations, and annual ETA conference, the team provides agile response and thorough training to enhance teaching quality of ETAs and LETs. Lynn Nakazawa holds an M.S. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Elie Yu holds an M.A. degree from School for International Training (SIT) Graduate Inst., Vermont. They are both in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and were grantees of the “FSE English Teacher Training & Research Awards.”

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Fredy González: Oppose the Qing, Restore the Ming: The Hong Men Fraternal Organization’s Malleable Nationalism

What does “Oppose the Qing and Restore the Ming”” mean in the mid-twentieth century? Fredy González analyzes the slogan in the context of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and the Cold War (1945-91) to understand the political philosophy of the Hong Men (Triad) organizations. Fredy González is an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico, published this year.

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Rose Doerfler: Microfluidic Devices for the Detection of Genetically Modified Foods

Genetically modified (GM) foods are a hot-button issue for activists in both Taiwan and the United States; however, accurate information about GM foods is often inaccessible. New diagnostic tools provide a solution. Ms. Doerfler’s research helps develop those tools. Rose Doerfler studied chemical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, focusing on tools for biomolecule detection. She spent the year working on a collaborative project with researchers at Yuan Ze University, building microfluidic devices to detect DNA sequences associated with genetically modified food crops.

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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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A Case of China’s Economic Power

A case study provides the opportunity to delve deeper into the perceived advantage that China wields over the United States in monetary power. By analyzing a real world case of Chinese monetary power, this research aims to answer the questions: when is economic coercive action in the Chinese-United States relationship likely to succeed, and why aren’t there more instances in which China tries to make use of its theoretical leverage. Over the course of the case studies, deeper analysis presents a more complex and complicated picture of the broader and more definitive areas of leverage presented in the analysis of economic realities. This suggests that theoretical advantage, while supported by economic figures, can often be hard to capitalize on in reality. In the case of China’s monetary power, this research makes use of “the most likely case” of economic coercive action (Eckstein, 1975). As such, this research aims to take a case of Chinese utilization of economic power that has a high likelihood of success and explore how successful it was in reality as well as what were the circumstances of its failure or success. This falls short of an all-out attempt to disprove the theoretical advantage, as is often

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Visiting a Buddhist Statue Factory in Taiwan

      During my 2016–17 Fulbright fellowship in Taiwan, I had the opportunity to visit the Taoyuan factory of Sheng Kuang 聖光 (Sacred Radiance), a leading manufacturer of Buddhist statuary whose finished work can be found in temples and sacred sites across Taiwan and other parts of Asia. While the company produces Buddhist images of every size, some of their statues are remarkably large, including the Ushiku Daibutsu 牛久大仏 in Japan, which at 390 feet is (as of this writing) the third-tallest statue in the world. They have also produced large-scale statues for temples in Taiwan, such as the 236-foot tall image of the Buddha Maitreya at the Tian’en Maitreya Buddha Temple 天恩彌勒佛院in Hsinchu. Visiting their factory offered an amazing chance to witness firsthand how these statues are produced, and to better understand how new technologies are changing the manufacture of Buddhist statues.       Scholars of Buddhism know that images and icons have been fundamental to Buddhism’s historical spread across Asia since its emergence in roughly the 5th century BCE, and statues of the Buddha Śākyamuni, bodhisattvas, and other figures have always featured prominently on the altars of Buddhist temples and played an important role in the everyday religious lives of

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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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