The Post-World War II World Order and the Unresolved Cultural Legacies of the Korean War

The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's cultural presence, going against the critical commonplace that the war was insignificant and calling for a reckoning with the cultural legacies of the Korean War. Christine Hong's A Violent Peace, Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict, and Crystal Mun-hye Baik's Reencounters illustrate new directions and new possibilities in the scholarship on the Korean War, which is dominated by historical studies often guided by traditional approaches to international relations or foreign policy. Informed by approaches in ethnic studies – and particularly the field's interest in racialization as transnational and cross-border phenomenon – these books show that it is not only productive to revisit the “forgotten war” but imperative to do so. Through a wide range of cultural texts and with an exclusive focus on the perspectives and experiences of people of color, these studies probe the underexamined role the conflict has played in shaping liberal ideas on freedom and justice, attend to the contradictions of the cultural forms that clothed these ideas in post-World War II US culture, and point to new cultural interventions that challenge and dislodge long-standing Cold War orthodoxies.

The Danish Cartoons, Charlie Hebdo and the culture wars: satiric limits in comparative national and transnational perspectives

A considerable body of academic literature has lauded political satirists as rebellious defenders of democracy and free speech against an establishment. Although satire is not always rebellious, this reputation of satirists and of satire may itself be the object of partisan capture. In this article, it is the object of capture by right-wing populists. In that respect, satire and the meta-discourse about satire can be used like any political rhetoric in gathering like-minded allies, claiming standards, and fighting opponents. With the Danish cartoons crisis of 2005-2006 and the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 2015, proponents of culture wars rhetoric added satire to their list of Western cultural legacies that needed defence against Islamic terrorism as well as left authoritarian elites who suppressed free speech through political correctness. They constructed simplistic global political dichotomies about satire, free speech, and civilisation and lifted events out of local contexts in a process of global framing. The culture war rhetoric was absolutist in support of free speech and satire on the international level. But the national level reveals the hortatory and partisan side to this rhetoric and the complexities that belie the absolutist stand. Nations are the arenas where struggles over free speech and political humour are played out.

Showing Out

In this essay, we center hip-hop culture and Black cultural legacies. We envision and offer a two-fold framework which illuminates the intersection between the two. We explore ways that the Black cultural experience (or better yet Black cultural praxis) has always brilliantly and organically demonstrated the shape and form of a scholarship of consequence. Black cultural praxis, or reflective action with a Black emancipatory influence, has always allowed freedom of movement, freedom of body, freedom of tongue, and freedom of voice. We translate what this cultural praxis teaches and urges regarding the transformation, unbinding, and freeing of both educators and educational spaces. We demonstrate how the intersection of hip-hop culture and Black cultural legacies can be instructive and transformative to educators. We invite educators to reimagine their classroom spaces by not only focusing on learning about hip hop but from it as well.

535 Rethinking Grand Challenges within Sustainable Animal Production

Dietary policies are rapidly evolving, as the urgencies related to public health and sustainability of the food system are becoming more tangible and menacing. Increasingly, such policies bring up the need for a protein transition. This implies that society should consume less “animal protein,” while the protein gap should be filled with legumes and nuts, a series of so-called “plant-based alternatives” (i.e., imitations of animal source foods), bioreactor foods (e.g., lab-grown meat), and other sources of protein (e.g., algae and insects). The risk of such an approach, when taken too far, is that it tends to generate a simplistic categorization of the food system, whereby animal source foods (red meat in particular) are seen as intrinsically harmful and the non-animal replacements as mostly beneficial. This division is further fuelled by societal dynamics that are generated by vested interests, ideologies, societal anxieties, virtue signalling, white-hat bias, and scapegoating. Although there are obviously clear challenges that need to be urgently addressed within the livestock sector (as for most other parts of the food system, including various types of crop agriculture), we should not be blinded by such an irrational binary division. Moreover, the proposed solutions would come with their own issues (water-intensive crops with high chemical inputs, ultra-processed imitation foods, the negative effects of pasture land conversion on biodiversity and carbon deposits, concerns related to food security and food sovereignty, etc.) Instead, production and consumption practices need to be carefully evaluated based on a holistic assessment, and not through the myopic use of reductionist metrics that can easily be manipulated to reify preconceived points of view. The problems at hand are multidimensional, requiring proper contextualization. From a nutritional point of view, for instance, protein comes with substantial variability related to digestibility and amino acid profiles. Also, animal source foods offer much more than “protein” alone, including several key micronutrients and bio-active compounds that are often more difficult to obtain from plants. Within the area of sustainability, the entire climate change discussion would also benefit from a more inclusive assessment, thereby avoiding all-too static interpretations (ignoring the role of progress and technological development), negligence of true nutritional value when comparing very different foods (e.g., when using such metrics as CO2-eq/kg or CO2-eq/kcal), the use of global aggregates for local discussions, simplification of global warming kinetics (cf., the GWP100 vs. GWP* debate), and so forth. Taken together, Grand Challenges should aim primordially at the achievement of adequate essential nutrition within specific dietary contexts that need to be more broadly assessed (also including lifestyle, cardiometabolic health status, culture, food preferences, purchase power, etc.) and that should be generated within the constraints of a sustainable agricultural operating space. Some red lines may indeed need to be drawn by policy makers (e.g., halting of deforestation or water pollution), whereas some other practices may need to be optimized (veterinary care, nutrient cycles, emissions, etc.) or promoted (carbon sequestration, improvement of soil health and biodiversity, etc.), but it would be a fatal mistake to consider animal agriculture as a monolithic entity that needs to be severely restricted or even dismantled. Taking livestock out of the equation would undermine our only hope on a healthy and sustainable food system. They are essential for the upcycling of otherwise inedible materials (forage, waste and side streams, etc.) into the high-quality foods that are needed to combat malnutrition globally, the valorisation of marginal lands that are otherwise unproductive, the sequestration of carbon and the (re)generation of soil health, the provision of crucial ecosystem services and landscape management, the generation of livelihoods, and the (all-too often underestimated) treasuring of our various cultural legacies. Instead, an improved integration of animal and crop agriculture should be central in any Grand Challenge. This should be done based on the best available science, but also by being prudent about the potential black swans further down the road. Complex systems always kick back in unpredictable manners, especially if they are radically altered through hurried top-down approaches.

Imua: Reflections on imua, talanoa-vā and leadership in the ongoing strategic journey of a New Zealand university

The appointment of the University of Waikato’s first Assistant Vice-Chancellor Pacific in February 2019 was an important milestone, not only recognising years of work and dedication by numerous Pacific and Māori staff, but triggering a new strategic direction for ‘Pacific at Waikato’. This paper explains that journey, one that is underpinned by Pacific cultural legacies, strengths, values and identity; built on talanoa-vā; informed by research, data analytics, student and community voice; combined with strategic thought and planning; and outworked in the pan-Pacific epithet, ‘imua’. This is a story of resilience, determination, negotiating a pandemic, problem-solving and innovation in an environment that seeks a ‘culture of belonging’ and where Pacific learners are encouraged to be themselves in the pursuit of educational achievement. This paper will be of interest to education providers, stakeholders and policy makers.

Bhada Tharu Homestay: Building National Integrity through Cultural Performance

This article studies the challenges of modernity in Tharu people’s way of life and how successfully they have sustained to maintain aesthetics of ethnicity coping together with modernity. The scholarly discussion of the impact of ritual performances of Tharu people to identify themselves in the national and international domain through the socio-cultural aspect of homestays provides us insight into how Tharus have become successful in preserving the memory of identity through cultural heritage. This study confines its approach within the Bhada village of Kailali district. It examines the progressive changes institutionalized after the homestay programmes in socio-cultural development of Tharu people’s cultural performances facing urbanization. Homestay programmes in the Tharu village of Kailali district have accelerated their financial advancement chiefly by their exceptionally distinct social-cultural legacies of rituals and performances. With the assistance of various exploration reports, it essentially analyzes the part of social execution like dance melodies among Tharu people to bear the progressions for economic exercises and vocation. With the assistance of Devkota and Bhattarai’s notion of homestays and rural development, the paper legitimizes the imminent practical development in the indigenous community by analyzing the issues from culture to modernity.

Empowering Indigenous Mexican Groups Through Fostering The Practice of Traditional Textile Crafts

In a world in which globalization and technology are at their peak, indigenous Mexican communities are struggling between the pull of modernity and their ancestral traditions. They are caught between two antagonistic practices—the tension between mass-produced and traditional handcrafted textiles. This research explored strategies to foster traditional textile crafts amongst indigenous Mexican communities with the purpose of empowering indigenous Mexican groups. The main outcome of this creative research is a swimwear collection created in collaboration with indigenous Mexicans artisans. Each piece conveys indigenous Mexican craft authentically and through the creation process I was able to outline some guidelines to effectively nurture the practice of traditional textile crafts in Mexico. Given that traditional textile crafts practised by other indigenous communities are striving to survive, the findings of this study provide valuable guiding principles to preserve and reinforce the cultural legacies of traditional textiles crafts.

Empowering Indigenous Mexican Groups Through Fostering The Practice of Traditional Textile Crafts

In a world in which globalization and technology are at their peak, indigenous Mexican communities are struggling between the pull of modernity and their ancestral traditions. They are caught between two antagonistic practices—the tension between mass-produced and traditional handcrafted textiles. This research explored strategies to foster traditional textile crafts amongst indigenous Mexican communities with the purpose of empowering indigenous Mexican groups. The main outcome of this creative research is a swimwear collection created in collaboration with indigenous Mexicans artisans. Each piece conveys indigenous Mexican craft authentically and through the creation process I was able to outline some guidelines to effectively nurture the practice of traditional textile crafts in Mexico. Given that traditional textile crafts practised by other indigenous communities are striving to survive, the findings of this study provide valuable guiding principles to preserve and reinforce the cultural legacies of traditional textiles crafts.

Cities 2020 Preface

This year, CITIES seeks to explore the theme ‘BRIDGING THE PAST AND THE FUTURE OF URBAN LANDSCAPE IN ASIA PACIFIC. This theme highlighted the continuity in the city between the past and the future also between legacy and development. The best way to bridge the gap between the past and the future is to help the city to find its identity and what the values to move forward in the future. It is not easy to find one identity even for an individual being, and most of the time, to find their identity, they have to reflect on what happened in the past. Cities that don’t understand their identity and value, will have less ability to choose what kind of development suits them the best. Cities without identity, choose the development solely based on the trends and also the opportunity without considering to preserve their unique identities. If this keeps happening, one day we will walk in the Asia Pacific and all the city will feel the same, taste the same and even smell the same and we have lost our uniqueness that makes people come to our city. This is why, it is important to highlight the theme of BRIDGING THE PAST AND THE FUTURE OF URBAN LANDSCAPE IN ASIA PACIFIC. By bridging the past and the future, we protect our cultural heritage assets and the built expressions of culture, military, economic, and religious forces as well as creating sustainable cities to accelerate our economic and infrastructure growth in a way that will not harm our cultural legacies and societies. For over 50 years, the integral and holistic approach to heritage and urban development has been highlighted in every heritage-related cultural policy document, stressing the need to balance the benefits of socioeconomic and urban development and cultural heritage preservation, and hopefully, this seminar will be one of the key contributors of it. Therefore, the conference presented the keynote speakers from the Australian National University (ANU) and National University of Singapore (NUS) who shared the whole ideas of city’s values and reaching the sustainability in the future. We hope that this conference can stimulate communication, cooperation, information exchanges among participants across countries. List of Conference Photographs, Sponsor Funding Acknowledgements, List of Committees are available in this pdf.