*The Program is subject to change due to circumstances.

Description of event

Despite their diverse histories and cultures, common tensions characterize debates about identity and nationhood across the Asia-Pacific. Homogenous visions of identity and nationhood sit uneasily alongside notions of citizenship that embrace cultural and ethnic diversity. In many societies, rising inequality feeds fear and resentment of immigrants, and legacies or memories of empire and colonialism have also fuelled resentment of foreign interference or ‘hegemony’. In stories of nationhood, what is forgotten or avoided is just as important as what is remembered.
What role, then, does education play in shaping ideas of identity and nationhood across the contemporary Asia-Pacific? To what extent are citizens taught to see political identity as something diverse and complex, and what are the implications of different approaches to citizenship education? And, should we see education as a potential tool for promoting national reconciliation, or as a dangerous weapon for inciting hatred and division?

Speakers on the panel

Tzu-Bin Lin
Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs at National Taiwan Normal University
Professor Tzu-Bin Lin works in the Department of Education and serves as Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). Previously, he worked in the UK and Singapore. His research interest includes education policy, bilingual/multilingual education, comparative education and media literacy. In the past decade, Prof. Lin published more than 50 papers and book chapters and conducted more than thirty research projects in the UK, Singapore and Taiwan. His recent works are on the development of bilingual/multilingual education policy in Taiwanese public schools.

Edward Vickers
Professor of Comparative Education @Kyushu University, Japan
Edward Vickers is Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, Japan, where he directs the university’s inter-disciplinary Taiwan Studies Program. He spent many years working in Hong Kong and Beijing, first as a schoolteacher and later as a textbook author and researcher. He has published widely on education and identity politics in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, as well as the politics of heritage and public culture across East Asia. His recent works include the monograph Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017), co-authored with Zeng Xiaodong, and (with Mark Frost and Daniel Schumacher) the volume, Remembering Asia’s World War Two
(2019). He is currently working on a project investigating the use of history in Chinese propaganda (e.g. school curricula and museums) relating to certain ‘minority’ regions in the far west (Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia) and to ‘Han’ societies on China’s eastern periphery (Hong Kong and Taiwan). The shifting politics of identity in Chinese societies is thus a central focus of his current work.

Kaori Okano
Professor of Japanese Studies/Asian Studies, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, @La Trobe University
Kaori Okano is Professor of Japanese Studies/Asian Studies, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, La Trobe University. While hailing from Hiroshima, she has spent many years of her life in Australia and New Zealand, as secondary school teacher and academic. She has widely published on sociological analysis of minorities, multiculturalism and social inequality in education. Her current research is on diversity and social justice in education, in terms of participation and politics of difference, which will be published in a monograph Education and Social Justice in Japan(early 2021). Her recent works include an edited book Nonformal education and civil society in Japan (2016), and co-edited volumes, Rethinking Japanese Studies : Eurocentrism in Asia-Pacific regions (with Y. Sugimoto) and Discourse, Gender and Shifting Identities in Japan (2018, with C. Maree).

Chair

Dr Rebecca Strating (La Trobe University)

Registration

Link to the ZOOM　
https://latrobe.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JjvMCCZoSQayFlecIslGiA
Ask your questions during the event on Slido – www.slido.com
Event code: # J774

Links

Link to the event (Latrobe Asia)
https://www.latrobe.edu.au/events/all/education-and-the-politics-of-identity-in-east-asia-today
Asia Studies at Kyushu University
http://asianstudies-kyushu.com
Kyushu University Taiwan Studies
https://www.kyushutaiwanstudies.com