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Stories of Kinship, Care, and COVID-19: Connecting Nepal and Himalayan New York

Please join us for a lecture with:

Sienna Craig, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College

Moderated by: Eveline Washul, Director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Columbia University

For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labo abroad and Mustang-based tourism have shaped their experiences for decades. Yet, more recently, permanent migrations to New York City are reshaping lives and social worlds. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork and friendship with people in and from Mustang, The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York, the book on which this presentation is based, combines narrative ethnography and short fiction to explore how individuals, families, and communities care for each other and carve out spaces of belonging in and through diaspora, at the nexus of environmental, economic, and cultural change. This presentation will also discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the lives of Himalayan and Tibetan New Yorkers, and how regional cultural practices and Tibetan Buddhist philosophies are shaping responses to this pandemic.

This event is organized by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program and cosponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

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Medical Humanities and Pandemic Urbanisms – Keynote: The Future Repeats Itself: Historical Roots of Anti-Chinese Animus in the time of COVID

[Registration is Required] // Registration opens Tuesday, February 16

The Future Repeats Itself: Historical Roots of Anti-Chinese Animus in the time of COVID
March 23, 6 PM EST

Welcome from Rishi Goyal and Arden Hegele (Columbia University)

Speaker Ari Larissa Heinrich (Australian National University), introduction by Lydia Liu, and respondent Eugenia Lean.

To mark the launch of the Medical Humanities major at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, we are proposing an inaugural virtual series, “Medical Humanities and Pandemic Urbanisms,” which will serve as an essential rallying point for Columbia faculty, current students, and alumni of the Medicine, Literature and Society track. While urban life has been overturned by the pandemic, this crisis invites us to think more broadly how the urban is an emergent form that can be redesigned to promote life and human flourishing. Featuring scholars, activists and artists from a range of fields—from epidemiology to science fiction to urban planning—the series will both illustrate the imaginative possibilities of the Medical Humanities, while also grounding its activities in the community-building work of students at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Medical Humanities engages with humanities and social sciences disciplines like history, English, anthropology, and sociology, as well as scientific fields like biology, genetics, neuroscience and biomedical engineering to emphasize the vulnerability of human bodies, the heterogeneity of anti- essentialist approaches to biology, and the social and cultural determinants of health. The work of humanities students in fields like reproductive justice, gender studies or race and ethnicity directly benefits from an understanding of biologic concepts such as gametogenesis, CRISPR technology, and mRNA platforms. Meanwhile, the study of science and medicine benefits from a sensitivity to rhetoric, structure, narrative and ambiguity. The intersection of medicine and the humanities provides a meaningful opportunity to engage humanities students with the problems of the world and practical knowledge, while introducing would-be scientists to the habits of mind and structures of feeling of the humanities.

Such interdisciplinary thinking has become even more pressing in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which provides an unexpected backdrop for the launch of the Medical Humanities major. Thinking with this context, “Medical Humanities and Pandemic Urbanisms” will take on the challenge of building our community of scholars and students in a virtual, dislocated environment.

The pandemic has reactivated hidden circuits of racialization and social differentiation. The very conditions of living with the virus have posed new questions about the limits of the human, and the possibility of sociability. As an early epicenter, New York City has been forced to question anew its contested globality—both global capital and its dependence on labor and precarity. Over six weeks, the series will pick up these themes related to New York City and its global peers; pandemic urbanisms; race, climate, and housing; and utopian/dystopian imaginaries.

The series begins with opening keynotes by Ari Larissa Heinrich on the long history of anti-Asian bias in epidemic—culminating with Covid-19. Zeynep Tufekci will present a second keynote on the pandemic and the city. Over the following weeks, we will host a series of events, such as panels on indoor/outdoor urban spaces and indigenous urban activism, and a book panel that considers the Covid-19 pandemic in its historical and imperial context. We will host a design challenge led by guest faculty facilitators and alumni of Medicine, Literature and Society, with a prize for the best student contribution. And lastly, we will elaborate on the theme of utopian imagination with a final roundtable event featuring BIPOC fantasy writers in the academy.

Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

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“The Korean War through the Prism of the Interrogation Room” – Monica Kim

CKR Book Talk and Korean Studies University Seminar

“The Korean War through the Prism of the Interrogation Room”
Monica Kim, New York University
Friday, March 19, 2021
4:00 PM

Co-sponsored by Academy of Korean Studies; Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University; Columbia University Seminar

Register here.

Abstract:
Through the interrogation rooms of the Korean War, this talk demonstrates how the individual human subject became both the terrain and the jus ad bellum for this critical U.S. war of ‘intervention’ in postcolonial Korea. In 1952, with the US introduction of voluntary POW repatriation proposal at Panmunjom, the interrogation room and the POW became a flashpoint for an international controversy ultimately about postcolonial sovereignty and political recognition.

The ambitions of empire, revolution and non-alignment converged upon this intimate encounter of military warfare: the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner of war. Which state could supposedly reinvent the most intimate power relation between the colonizer and the colonized, to transform the relationship between the state and subject into one of liberation, democracy or freedom? Tracing two generations of people across the Pacific as they navigate multiple kinds of interrogation from the 1940s and 1950s, this talk lay outs a landscape of interrogation – a dense network of violence, bureaucracy, and migration – that breaks apart the usual temporal bounds of the Korean War as a discrete event.

Monica Kim is Assistant Professor in U.S. and the World History in the Department of History at New York University. Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press), is a trans-Pacific history of decolonization told through the experiences of two generations of people creating and navigating military interrogation rooms of the Korean War. She has published work in journals such as Critical Asian Studiesand positions: asia critiqueconcerning U.S. empire, war-making, and decolonization. She is also a member of the Editorial Collective for Radical History Review. Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Penn Humanities Forum at University of Pennsylvania, and the Korea Foundation.

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