DLC Funded Research

This project highlights the roles of how Indigenous led travels and hosting helped build the global Indigenous movement from the late 1960s to the contemporary era. Our project is built on an extensive collection of oral histories and archival work with 25 Indigenous newsletters, mainly based in North America but also Japan. As there are almost no secondary materials available other than a handful of short articles, we are mainly building up an archive of primary materials. I have been training nearly ten SFU graduate students in archival studies, using digital and paper materials. Following the methods of DLC member Jeremy Brown, we are assessing these materials in terms of their public impact and digitizing key primary materials deemed appropriate for a public audience after checking with copyright and Indigenous protocols. 

In academic terms, this project contributes to Indigenous Studies, which is often based on local or national contexts, to show the critical importance of transnational engagements. Moreover, it builds on Transnational Studies, which has often paid little attention to Indigenous people's participation in building alliances. Lastly, Asian Studies has historically given short shrift to Indigenous issues, and this project is starting to gain ground as a prominent example of the necessity to consider Indigenous presence in regional scholarship. 

This project aims to collaboratively advance the knowledge of East Asian digital media culture and digital platforms by organizing an international conference, which will be followed by the publication of an edited volume. Professor Dal Yong Jin, in collaboration with leading international scholars – Kyong Yoon at UBC Okanagan and Benjamin Han at the University of Georgia, Athens – to organize a two-day international conference on the socio-cultural analysis of East Asian media cultures in the digital platform age. The conference will be hosted by SFU’s Transnational Culture and Digital Technology Lab, which has contributed to Asian media studies for the past several years under the directorship of Prof. Jin. 

The proposed project will have scholarly impacts and merits because it is a pioneering endeavor to advance and mobilize knowledge on the ways in which Asia engages with global digital media environments. Moreover, the project will make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary studies of contemporary Asia by exploring Asia as an important cultural region in which global power relations around digital media technology and culture are contested (Jin, 2023).  

Despite the significance and impacts of global digital platforms in the production and circulation of East Asian cultural content, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects on the topic have been rare. Moreover, digital platform studies have remained Western-centric, and thus, East Asian perspectives on the topic have not been sufficiently addressed. In this regard, this project will make an important contribution to studies of Asian digital media by critically questioning the dominance of the West as the epicenter of global media production. The project examines how the proliferation of digital platforms has increased US-based platform corporations’ control over East Asian media environments, while also enabling East Asian content creators to explore and engage in counter-flows of media and culture from different national markets. 

The proposed conference and subsequent publication will make a significant impact on scholarship on Asian Studies and digital media studies. Given the scarcity of collaborative studies and conferences on the topic, the proposed project will be an outstanding initiative to facilitate interdisciplinary and creative collaboration across Asian Studies, cultural studies, digital media studies, and the nascent field of platform studies. The conference will invite not only leading scholars, but also provide graduate students with opportunities to participate in the project and advance their research skills and network. The conference will also be open to undergraduate students and the general public for wider knowledge mobilization. The conference’s outcomes will be edited as a volume in a timely manner and published by a recognized university press.   

Since 2017 the Xinjiang crisis has garnered a heightened media coverage concerning the human rights crisis confronting the Indigenous Turkic Muslims in Northwest China. There has been a growing public interest in understanding the region’s history, culture, politics, and the peoples and their relations to the China proper.  

What is lacking is a critical perspective on the transnational, transborder histories and exchanges of the imperial and colonial tactics of the Russian and Qing empires and the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China over the span of 19~20th centuries. The histories of border demarcation and securitization resulting from the relations between the dual empires (Russia and Qing) and dual Communist powers (USSR and China) are crucial in understanding the geopolitics and colonial realities of the so-called Xinjiang, which increasingly also serves as China’s economic corridor into the post-Soviet independent Central Asian states.  

To fill this gap, Guldana Salimjan would like to bring two famous scholars based in the US, Dr. Marianne Kamp (Indiana University) and Dr. Eric Schluessel (George Washington University) to Vancouver. Here they will deliver two talks for an academic and general audience about sources and methodologies studying histories of sensitive regions with students and faculties at SFU and UBC to understand the present through historical perspectives. 

The research geographies, methods/methodologies, and themes of the three scholars—Kamp, Schluessel, and Salimjan overlap in terms of empire, colonialism, social history, oral history, and archival research methods. Their discussion will enrich DLC’s research focus on Asian indigeneities. It would also helpful for students and faculties to learn about these regions and research methods, considering China and Russia are increasingly off limits for fieldwork and archival research.  

The Simon Fraser University Asian Philosophy Workshop is an event for scholars and students working in Asian philosophical thought, with the primary goal of making connections between Asian philosophy and Western analytic philosophy. The Workshop addresses a significant gap in the scholarly dialogue between these two philosophical traditions and aims to bring attention to this emerging field.

In North America, much of the scholarship in Asian philosophy has taken place outside of philosophy departments, e.g. in East Asian studies, history, religious studies, literary studies, and other humanities and social science departments. However, in recent years, analytic philosophers have begun to recognize the significance and value of philosophical traditions outside of the Western philosophical sphere. The Workshop will create new opportunities for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary philosophical enrichment. Our long-term goal is to establish this Workshop as an annual event that partners with other departments at SFU as well as other Canadian Universities.

The Workshop will span two days and include paper presentations, commentaries, and opportunities for informal conversation. The theme this year is Chinese Metaphysics. We envision a diverse group of participants, including scholars at various career stages from different institutions across North America. In addition to invited speakers, we expect to attract both local and international participants. Locally, there are many faculty working in metaphysics and/or Chinese philosophy, as well as MA and PhD students.

The Institute for Environmental Learning (I.E.L.) presents a collaborative research project involving an SFU Ph.D. Student/Researcher, Vietnamese professors, and university students. This project aims to investigate the biocultural diversity in Vietnam. This research initiative holds particular significance as Vietnam is formulating strategies to attain sustainability and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 amidst rapid urbanization. By establishing global partnerships, the project endeavours to foster a comprehensive comprehension between the global north and global south, which plays a crucial role in helping us realize a sustainable future. The research will focus on the positive experiences of Vietnamese university students related to urbanization, biocultural diversity, tourism, culture, and education for sustainable development. The methodology will be Photovoice participatory action research, which allows participants to capture the viewpoints of their ecosphere, sociosphere, and technosphere, eliciting an authentic narrative of their city and culture.