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Faculty Associates
| > Vijay Agnew | > Russ Patrick Alcedo |
| > Russell Belk | > Gregory Chin |
| > Raju Das | > Lisa Drummond |
| > Enakshi Dua | >Tony Fang |
| > Joshua Fogel | > Margo Gewurtz |
| > Pietro Giordan | > Theodore (Ted) Goossen |
| > Jay Goulding | > Shubhra Gururani |
| > Laam Hae | > Sharon Hayashi |
| > Susan Henders | > Zulfikar Hirji |
| > Joan Judge | > Hong Kal |
| > Ilan Kapoor | > Ali Kazimi |
| > Philip Kelly | > Ann Kim |
| > Janice Kim | > Thomas Klassen |
| > Janet Landa | > Jessica Li |
| > Jinyan Li | > Lucia Lo |
| > Guida Man | > Radhika Mongia |
| > Arun Mukherjee | > Ananya Mukherjee-Reed |
| > Michael Nijhawan | > Shobna Nijhawan |
| > Hyun Ok Park | > Valerie Preston |
| > Fahim Quadir | > Robin Roth |
| > Janet Rubinoff | > Trichy Sankaran |
| > Albert Schrauwers | > Sharada Srinivasan |
| > Yukari Takai | > Alicia Turner |
| > Penny Van Esterik | > Peter Vandergeest |
| > Bernard Wolf | > Wendy S. Wong |
| > Yuk-lin Renita Wong | > Lorna Wright |
| > Xueqing Xu | > Qiang Zha |
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Vijay Agnew, PhD
Professor, Department of Social Science
York University
Vijay Agnew is the author of Women's Health, Women's Rights: Perspectives on Global Health Issues (2003), Gender, Home and Nation: A Century of Writings on South Asian Women (2003), Where I Come From (2003), Resisting Discrimination: Women from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and the Women's Movement in Canada (1996). The latter won the Gustav Myers Award as an "outstanding book on the subject of human rights in North America." She specializes in feminist issues, gender and diversity as well as international migration and identity.
Russ Patrick R. Alcedo, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Dance
York University
Patrick Alcedo is a dance ethnographer and a specialist on Philippine traditional dances. His work focuses on performance of gender, folklorization of religion, and world dance in the diaspora. Under the auspices of the Asian Cultural Council, he received his PhD in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside, where he also did his postdoctoral fellowship with the Southeast Asian, Text, Ritual, and Performance (SEATRiP).
In 2007, he took residence at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. as a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow in Theorizing Cultural Heritage.
Born and raised in Aklan, Philippines, his research on the socio-economic conditions of aspiring boxers in that province resulted in Boxing To Be The Next Pacquiao, a video project he produced with The New York Times.
Russell Belk, PhD
Professor, Marketing
Schulich School of Business
York University
Russell Belk is the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at the Schulich School of Business. He received his PhD in Marketing from the University of Minnesota in 1972. He is past president of the Association for Consumer Research and the International Association of Marketing and Development, and is a fellow in the Association for Consumer Research and the American Psychological Association. He has received the Paul D. Converse Award, two Fulbright Fellowships, and honorary professorships on four continents. In 2005 he received the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Award for Long Term Contribution to Consumer Research.
Besides York, he has also taught at the University of Utah, University of Illinois, Temple University, Claremont Graduate University, and universities in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, New Zealand and Australia. During the 2009.2010 academic year, Professor Belk was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Hong Kong.
His research involves the meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-giving, and materialism and his work is often cultural, visual, qualitative, and interpretive. He is the co-founder of the Association for Consumer Research Film Festival. He is currently on the editorial board of 20 journals, has over 400 publications and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.
Lisa Drummond, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Social Science
York University
Lisa Drummond is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.
After living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam in the early 1990s, she completed a degree in Human Geography at the Australia National University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Singapore.
Professor Drummond's research focuses primarily on urban social life in Vietnam, including analyses of popular culture, specifically in television serials and women's magazines, women's roles in Vietnamese society, and the application of western concepts such as public and private to the use of space in Vietnamese cities.
Her publications include several co-edited books, most recently Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam, with Mandy Thomas, and Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam, with Helle Rydstrom. In 2008.2009, Professor Drummond was on a Faculty of Arts Research Leave working on a book based on my research in public space in Hanoi from the French colonial period to the present. Her next project will focus on Hanoi during the Subsidy Era, 1954-1985.
Tony Fang, PhD
Associate Professor, School of Human Resource Management
York University
Tony Fang is an Associate Professor of Human Resources Management and Industrial Relations at York University and a research associate with the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources Management at the University of Toronto. Currently, he also serves as the Domain Leader in Economic and Labour Market Integration at CERIS – Ontario Metropolis Centre, a Council Member of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), and a past Board Member of the Chinese Economists Society. He is also a visiting professor at Fudan University, Southwest University of Finance and Economics and China University of Geosciences, all in China. In 2010, he received the tile of “Chutian Scholar”of Hubei Province. In June 2011, he was named President of the Chinese Economists Society (2012-2013), a U.S.-based professional association with more than 2,000 members worldwide. It publishes the influential China Economic Review.
Professor Fang has a PhD in Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management from the University of Toronto and a MA in Economics from Memorial University of Newfoundland. His areas of research interest encompass issues of compensation and benefits, high performance workplace practices, pension, retirement policy and the ageing workforce, education, immigration, and minimum wages, union impact on wages, innovation and firm growth, pay equity and employment equity.
He has published in such journals as Industrial Relations (Berkeley), Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of Labor Research, International Journal of Manpower, Journal of Management History, Social Indictors Research, and Perspectives on Labour and Income. He also received numerous research grants and awards from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Human Resources and Social Development Canada.
Joshua Fogel , PhD
Professor, Department of History
York University
Born in Brooklyn, raised in Berkeley, college at the University of Chicago (BA 1972), MA and PhD at Columbia University (1980), with graduate student study at Kyoto University (1976-87), taught at Harvard University (1981-88) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1989-2005), with visiting stints at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2001-03), Kyoto University (1996-97), British Inter-University China Centre (2007), and Kansai University (2008), Josh Fogel has lived and worked all over the place. Trained initially in Chinese history, he developed an abiding interest in Japanese history, too, and after many years of language study, found a way to integrate the two: the study of Sino-Japanese relations (cultural and political).
His first major project was a biographical study of Japan premier prewar Sinologist, Naito Konan, which appeared in 1984 as Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan (1866-1934). Subsequent work has tended to focus on the dynamic interaction between these two cultural spheres. His sixth single-author book, Articulating the Sinosphere: Place and Time in Sino-Japanese Relations, was published by Harvard University Press in spring 2009. He has also published 17 edited volumes and 14 volumes of translation, with three more in press. For 15 years, he served as editor-in-chief of Sino-Japanese Studies (1989-2004), which was revived as an online journal in 2009 and for which he now serves as editor again.
Margo Gewurtz, PhD
Professor, Department of Humanities
York University
Margo Gewurtz has held several senior administrative posts including Associate Director of the Toronto-York Joint Center for Asia-Pacific Studies, Chair of the Division of Humanities, Vice-Chair of Senate and Master of Founders College. Her research interests are in the field of Sino-Western cultural relations.
She is co-author of Guide to Canadian Archival Sources on Missionaries in East Asia (1989) and author of Between America & Russia: Chinese Student Radicalism & Travel Books of Tsou T'ao-Fen (1975). She has published numerous essays on Canadian China missionaries and their Chinese coworkers.
Her recent publication is “The Afterlife of Memory in China: Yang Jiang’s Literary Memoir”, published in ARIEL, Life Writing in International Contexts Issue v.39 (1-2).
Theodore (Ted) Goossen, PhD
Professor, Department of Humanities
York University
Ted Goossen is a professor in the Department of Humanities. His interests lie largely in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, the Asian Canadian experience, Asian film and cross-cultural analysis.
He is editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, and has translated numerous modern and contemporary Japanese writers. His most recent activities include articles and translations in Brick (Toronto), Monkey Business (Tokyo), a dialogue with Motoyuki Shibata in Subaru (Tokyo).
Jay Goulding, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Social Science
York University
Jay Goulding is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science. His expertise is in classical and modern Chinese and Japanese philosophy, religion and culture as well as hermeneutic phenomenology.
He has published in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Analysis: A Journal of Comparative Religion, Political Theory, Catalyst, Anhui Normal University Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, China Review International, and Beijing University's Gate of Philosophy. In 2005, he contributed to Scribner's New Dictionary of the History of Ideas encyclopedia with entries on East Asian philosophy, religion and culture in both ancient and modern perspectives.
In 2006, he gave guest lectures at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the Institute of Foreign Philosophy, Beijing University on the interaction of Daoism (Laozi, Zhuangzi) with phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). He has recently completed an edited book titled China-West Interculture, Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming’s Thinking for The Association of Chinese Philosophers in America (ACPA) Series on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (Global Scholarly Publications).
Shubhra Gururani, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
York University
Professor Gururani’s research explores the social histories and cultural
politics of gender, nature, place, and science as they unfold in
postcolonial settings like India. Interested in the cultural politics of
power, knowledge, and difference, she draws from feminist and
postcolonial theory, science and technology studies, and political
ecology to analyse the material and symbolic co-production of nature,
race, gender, caste, and ethnicity in India.
Through archival and
extensive ethnographic research in the Himalayas, her research contests
the ontological divide between nature and society and demonstrates how
nature is not merely the ground for environmental conflicts or a
‘resource,’ as it is commonly assumed, but is constitutive of everyday
practices of labour, livelihood, knowledge, and subjectivity.
Her
interest in the cultural politics of nature is not limited to the rural
and extends to new urban spaces in India. She is conducting research on
the urban political ecology of water and sewage in the Millennial city
of India, Gurgaon and is currently part of a SSHRC-funded Major
Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) on Global Suburbanisms, in
which she is the Team Lead for South Asia as well as for Waste and Sewage
Infrastructure.
Her papers have been published in Journal of Peasant
Studies, International Journal of Social Sciences, and Gender, Place and
Culture.
Laam Hae, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
York University
Laam Hae studies and teaches urban political economy, cultural politics, critical race theory and feminist methodology. More specifically, Professor Hae has researched popular struggles over gentrification, the post-industrialization of urban economies, city marketing, zoning regulations, the militarization of urban space and “the right to the city,” both in North America and East Asia (specializing particularly in South Korea).
Susan Henders, DPhil
Director, York Centre for Asian Research
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
York University
Susan Henders' area of concentration is international relations and comparative politics in the Asia-Pacific (especially greater China) and western Europe. Her research concerns the politics of human rights, democracy/democratization, and citizenship, with an emphasis on minority and indigenous communities, and on territorial politics, especially territorial self-government and special status regions.
Amongst her publications are Territoriality, Asymmetry, and Autonomy: Catalonia, Corsica, Hong Kong, and Tibet, (2009) ; Democratization and Identity: Regimes and Ethnicity in East and Southeast Asia (2004); and Macao (1997).
Joan Judge, PhD
Professor, Department of History
York University
Joan Judge received her PhD from Columbia University in 1993. Her most recent publication is The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008). She is also the author of Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996) and of numerous articles on Chinese print culture and Chinese women. She taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before moving to Toronto in 2005 and is currently Professor of History at York University. She has spent several years in East Asia both gathering sources and sharing her research findings with Chinese and Japanese colleagues. Her current research project is A New Approach to the Popular Press in China: Gender and Cultural Production, 1904-1937.
Hong Kal
Associate Professor, Visual Arts
Faculty of Fine Arts
York University
Hong Kal teaches art and cultural histories of Korea and East Asia. Her current research explores urban spectacles and politics of exhibitions in relation to issues of nationalism and neoliberal globalization. Her research has been supported by Advanced Research Grant from Korea Foundation (2007-2008) and SSHRC Standard Grant (2010-2013). She is the author of Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Routledge, 2011).
Ilan Kapoor, PhD
Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University
Ilan Kapoor is a Professor and Undergraduate Programme Director at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University.
His teaching and research focus on critical development studies, postcolonial studies, participatory development, and democratic theory. His geographic areas of interest include South Asia (especially India and Pakistan). He is the author of The Postcolonial Politics of Development (Routledge, 2008).
Philip Kelly, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Geography
York University
Philip Kelly's research focuses on Filipino transnational migration and labour market experiences in Canada, and the transformative effects of migration on economic, cultural and political life in the Philippines. His broader research interests relate to the political economy of development in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to labour regulation, industrialization and urbanization.
He is the author of Landscapes of Globalisation: Human Geographies of Economic Change in
the Philippines (2000), co-editor of Globalization and the Asia-Pacific: Contested Territories (1999), and co-author of Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction (2007).
He is co-investigator in the SSHRC-MCRI project on the ‘Challenges of Agrarian Transitions in
Southeast Asia’ (2005-2010), and Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Knowledge Impact in Society project called the 'Toronto Immigrant Employment Data Initiative' (2008-2010).
Ann Kim, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
York University
Ann H. Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Prior to joining York in 2006, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Sociology from Brown University, where she was a trainee at the Population Studies and Training Center. She also holds a MSW from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Ethnic and Pluralism Studies.
Her research is largely motivated by questions related to the immigrant and ethnic integration process and to the spatial manifestations of urban inequality. Among these interests, she studies Asian immigrant integration in North America, particularly exploring the emergence and effect of panethnicity. More recently, she has developed an active program of research on the Korean
community in Canada, ranging from issues related to the housing and living arrangements of Korean seniors to Korean immigrant entrepreneurship.
Janice Kim, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of History
York University
Janice C. H. Kim is an associate professor of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Born in Seoul and raised in the Washington D.C. area, Dr. Kim has a B.A. and M.A. in History from The Johns Hopkins University (1996) and a M.A. in East Asian Studies (1997) and Ph.D. in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, U.K. (2001).
Among her published articles and book chapters are: "The Pacific War and Working Women in Late-Colonial Korea," Signs 33:1 (Fall 2007), 81-104, “The Varieties of Women’s Wage Work in Colonial Korea,” The Review of Korean Studies, 10:3 (June 2007), 119-146, “Processes of Feminine Power: Shamans in Central Korea,” in Keith Howard, ed., Korean Shamanism: Revivals, Survivals and Change, (Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 1998), 113-133, and “Labor Mobilization in Late-Colonial Korea, 1937-1945,” in Andre Schmid, ed., Reader on Colonial Korea, Columbia University Press, forthcoming. Her book, To Live to Work: Factory Women in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2009) concerns the popular expansion of gender, labor and political consciousness among working women in colonial Korea. In this work she examines Japanese imperialism and the interplays between domestic events and the broader social and economic changes brought on by the First World War, the Depression and the Pacific War. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Between Mountains: Refugee Life during the Korean War,” which explores the social and economic history of refugees and civilian livelihood during and after the Korean War.
Plans for future research include a study of affection, labor and the moral economy, in developing South Korea, from the 1960s to the 1980s. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies, Northeast Asia Council, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the British Council. She currently (2010) holds a Korea Foundation Field Research Fellowship.
Thomas Klassen, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
York University
Thomas Klassen in an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and the School of Public Policy and Administration.
He is co-author, among other books, of Partisanship, Globalization and Canadian labour market policy: Four provinces in comparative perspective (University of Toronto Press, 2006), and co-editor of Casino state: Legalized gambling in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2009). His most recent co-edited volume is Retirement, Work and Pensions in Ageing Korea (Routledge, 2010).
During 2006-2007, he was Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. His major current research interest is on income security policy, and the welfare state, in comparative context, particularly South Korea.
Janet Landa, PhD
Professor, Department of Economics
York University
Janet Landa teaches law-and-economics and public choice at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The focus of her research interest for over two decades has been in the law-and-economic analysis of extra-legal institutions for achieving social order such as social norms embedded in ethnic trading networks and gift exchange.
She has published extensively on trust, ethnicity and identity of Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia, a topic which formed the central focus of her work on the "Economics of Identity". The earliest paper in the “Economic of Identity” is her widely cited 1981 paper entitled “ A Theory of the Ethnically Homogeneous Middleman Group: An Institutional Alternative to Contract Law” The Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 10 (2):349-362. This paper is reprinted in her book, Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange (1998). More recently, her research interest has expanded to include the bioeconomic analysis of non-human and human societies.
She was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Bioeconomics, an international scholarly journal that integrates economics with biology, launched in 1999 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, now merged with Springer. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript, titled Chinese Merchants and their Ethnic Trade Networks, made possible by a York University Faculty of Arts Fellowship.
Jessica Tsui Yan Li, PhD
Jessica Tsui Yan Li is a Faculty Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research at York University. She is also affiliated with the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. Her major research areas are on modern Chinese literature and film, Hong Kong studies, gender studies, comparative literature, translation theories, stage and film adaptations, feminine in Chinese culture and Asian North American literature, drama and film.
Her articles have appeared in the refereed journals, Neohelicon and Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, and in the books titled, Ibsen and the Modern Self, Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and Asia: Local and Global Perspectives. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Eileen Chang’s self-writing, self-translations and adaptation.
Professor Li received her doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She also received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship. She had taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Toronto. She is currently teaching at York University.
Lucia Lo, PhD
Professor, Department of Geography
York University
Professor Lo's research interests spans many areas. Her diaspora work focuses primarily on immigrant settlement and integration issue. She uses a political economy approach to examine changing settlement patterns, immigrant business structures, and labour market performance of diverse immigrant groups. She has published extensively on Toronto's diverse Chinese community, including their consumer behaviour. She also extends her interest on consumer behaviour to explore the impact of international retailing and modern retail formats on consumption in China and India. Her current work on immigration and settlement focuses on immigrant service provision, and the role of ethnic/foreign banks on immigrant integration.
Guida Man, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Women's Studies
York University
Guida Man's areas of specialization traverse globalization and transnational migration, women and work, family and gender relations, ethnic and racial diversities, and social justice and social change. Specifically, her research focuses on the experience of Chinese immigrant women in Canada.
Guida is the recipient of SSHRC Standard Research Grant for her 'Transnational Migration Trajectories of Immigrant Women Professionals in Canada' project.
Michael Nijhawan, DPhil
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
York University
After receiving his DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, Michael Nijhawan began his academic career in an interdisciplinary research project on 'Ritual Dynamics' at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2006, he accepted a position as an assistant professor in Sociology at York. His research focuses primarily on violence and suffering and its translatability in cultural practices. His second research interest is on transnational religion, immigration and identity formation. He has an in-depth specialization in Sikh communities in Punjab province of India and the Sikh diaspora in Europe. He has conducted research in South Asia (Punjab) and Europe (Sikhs and Ahmadis).
He is the author of Dhadi Darbar. Religion, Violence, and the Performance of Sikh History (Oxford University Press, 2006), a number of refereed and non refereed articles as well as book chapters, in both English and German. He is also co-producer of the documentary 'Musafer-Sikhi is Travelling' (2008). Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia has recently been published.
Shobna Nijhawan, PhD
Assistant Professor, Departmento f Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
York University
Dr. Shobna Nijhawan is an Assistant Professor of Hindi in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. She has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where her thesis research focused on "Public Reasoning as Moral Duty: Hindi Women's Journals and Nationalistic Discourse (1910-1930)." Her MA is from Heidelberg University, Germany. She is editor of Nationalism in the Vernacular. Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom (Permenant Black, 2009).
Dr. Nijhawan's teaching and research interests include: the Hindi public sphere (20th century); Hindi and Urdu literature; Hindi, Urdu and English women's periodicals; theories of gender and nationalism; Ayurveda and allopathy in Hindi fiction and Hindi medical periodicals (first half of the 20th century); and technology enhanced learning.
Hyun Ok Park, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
York University
My work as a sociologist encompasses interdisciplinary engagement with the philosophy of history, the crisis of capitalism, and the epistemological issues associated with comparative studies.
My archival and ethnographic research concerns Korean transnational labour migration to and from northeast China, a border area known as Manchuria and the Balkans of Asia, at two historical moments--the first half of the twenty century and the current post-cold war period. I compare political cultures and social practices of community, sovereignty, and rights in the contexts of the nation-state system, the advent of global capitalism, and geopolitics. My research compares different periods not as discrete moments but as interdependent units formed through historical memories and the concept of history. Asia and diaspora as the site of my work leads me to explore the comparability of modernity of places, center and margin, and west and rest.
Professor Park's recent publications include: “The Politics of Korean Unification and Neoliberal Democracy” in Sonia Ryang (ed.), North Korea: Towards a Better Understanding (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2009); a review of Namhee Lee's The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007) in Contemporary Sociology; and “The Rights of the Colonial Returnees,” in Jesook Song (ed.), New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberalism (Routledge Press, forthcoming).
With the working title of Neoliberal Democracy: Korean Transnational Labor Migration, History, the Post-Cold War Asia, her new book in progress brings the variant nexus of national, human, ethnic, and labor rights into dialogue with the politics of neoliberal democracy and history. It explores the historical change of sovereignty not as axiomatic postmodernity but rather as a product of the politics of history.
Fahim Quadir, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Social Science
York University
Fahim Quadir specializes in comparative politics, international development relations and political economy. His research focuses on civil society and democratization, development planning and management, economic liberalization and globalization, governance and human development, micro-finance, NGOs, and regionalism.
To date, he has co-edited three books, namely: Democracy and civil society in Asia: globalization, democracy, and civil society in Asia (2004), Democracy and civil society in Asia: democratic transitions and social movements in Asia (2004), and Crises of governance in Asia and Africa (2001). He has also published a number of articles relating to corporate capitalism, market reforms, social movements, structural adjustments, human security and regional development.
Robin Roth, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Geography
York University
Robin Roth's research interests include the political ecology of conservation with a particular focus on mountain environments of Asia, rural livelihood change, indigenous knowledge and spatiality, integrated social-ecological analysis and park-people conflicts. Her current project investigates the ways in which rural residents in highland Thailand, both individually and collectively, use emerging markets to reorganize their livelihoods in response to protected area establishment and explores the implications for social equity and environmental conservation.
Janet Rubinoff, PhD
Department of Humanities
York University
Janet Rubinoff is a social/cultural anthropologist, with a field specialty in Indian culture, history and modern society. She teaches a Foundations Course on Indian culture and the arts from ancient to modern times. She also has taught Modern Indian History and Introduction to South Asian Studies (for Social Sciences). The latter is the core course for the South Asian Studies Program and has focused on nation and state building since independence in five states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Her main research interest is on fisheries development in India and South Asia, with specific studies on fisherwomen in the markets, backwater fish farming (both indigenous ponds and modern shrimp farming), and on issues of globalization and marine fisheries management in
India.
She has done consulting work on fish farming methods and feasibility development projects as well as presented and published papers on backwater aquaculture, female entrepreneurship in fishing communities of Goa, and management issues and legal pluralism in the fisheries of South Goa district (the latter part of a three-year IDPAD research project on fisheries management in
South Asia).
Trichy Sankaran
Professor, Music
Faculty of Fine Arts
York University
Professor Trichy Sankaran is a world-renowned percussion virtuoso, Indian music scholar and composer, and the founding director of Indian music studies at York University.
Over the years, Prof. Sankaran has bridged eastern and western pedagogical styles and has influenced generations of students who have become noted performers, composers, and music educators themselves. He has given numerous lecture demonstrations and workshops at various universities in Canada, U.S., Europe, Southeast Asia, and India. He has made valuable contributions to many scholarly conferences across North America and has published numerous articles and two notable textbooks on South Indian classical drumming and the art of Konnakkol (rhythm solfege).
Trichy Sankaran has performed at major festivals in India, Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia and North America. In his more than 55 years of concert experience in Carnatic music, he has performed with all top rank artists of India. He has played in jugalbandhis (North-South combo) with famous Hindustani musicians. In addition to his usual traditional settings, he has performed with Nexus, gamelan, jazz, electronic, African music ensembles and world drums, as well as his own group, Trichy's Trio.
As a composer, Trichy Sankaran has to his credit numerous pieces in the genres of gamelan, jazz, traditional western classical orchestra, South Indian dance and world music ensembles. He continues to perform and write compositions for contemporary and world music ensembles. He has released many CDs. His recordings include Laya Vinyas (1990), Sunada (1993), Lotus Signatures (1997), Ivory Ganesh Meets Doctor Drums (1998), Catch 21 (2002), and Gaja Leela (2005).
Prof. Sankaran has received numerous honours and awards for his contributions to University teaching and artistic excellence in the professional field. These include recipient of the title 'Sangita Kalanidhi' and Award from the Music Academy, Madras (one of the highest honours that is bestowed upon an artist of eminence by the Academy each year) as well as the degree of Doctorate in Music for his outstanding achievements in the academic and professional fields from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in 1998. He is also a recipient of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Award for teaching excellence (1992), and the Professional of the Year Award by the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce (1998) for artistic excellence.
Prof. Sankaran has made a contribution of unique range and scope to the Indian artistic community and to Canadian musical culture. He has dedicated himself for the cause and propagation of Carnatic music in North America in various ways – as an educator, global artist, composer, and collaborator.
Albert Schrauwers, PhD
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology
York University
Albert Schrauwers conducts anthropological research in Canada and Indonesia. His research interests include kinship, ethnic group formation, colonialism, and the role of religion in the development of civil society. He has written extensively on marriage, households and development in the highlands of Central Sulawesi, including a book on colonial reformation in the highlands between 1892 and 1995 published in 2000. His nineteenth century communitarian Awaiting the Millennium: The Children of Peace and the Village of Hope, 1812-1889 was published in 1993.
Sharada Srinivasan, PhD
Assistant Professor, International Development Studies
York University
Sharada Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science where she teaches Development Studies. Her research is focused on two broad themes: gender, culture and violence; and young people and development. She is currently working on daughter elimination and children's experience of gender discrimination and gender violence. She has written on dowry, domestic violence and daughter elimination in India and has published in World Development, Economic and Political Weekly and Journal of Development Studies. She is the author of Daughter Deficit: Sex Selection in Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2012).
Alicia Turner, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities
York University
Alicia Turner specializes in the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia with an emphasis on the period of British colonialism in Burma/Myanmar. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, colonialism and nationalism.
Seeking to understanding the cultural aspects of British colonialism and how it transformed local ideas and categories, she investigates the key role religion played in the colonial encounter, both as an ordering category for colonial rule and as a mode of response. Her work on Buddhist lay movements in Burma from 1890 to 1920, studies issues of education, the performance of respect and campaigns for moral reform. Her current projects also include a study of the Cetiyingana debate between Ledi Sayadaw and Okpo Sayadaw over footwear in pagodas and a collaborative project on Europeans Buddhist monks at the turn of the twentieth century.
She is also the editor of The Journal of Burma Studies.
Penny Van Esterik, PhD
Professor, Department of Anthropology
York University
Penny Van Esterik has done most of her research in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Lao PDR and Indonesia). Her new publication, Food Culture in Southeast Asia (Greenwood Press) was released in August 2008. She was co-investigator in the IDRC Laos Project on "Building Research Capacity in Community-Based Natural Resource Management" (2003-2006), which examined Lao food security and natural resource management. Her other publications include: Flexible Networking in Research Capacity Training at National University of Laos: Lessons for North South Collaboration; Risks, Rights and Regulation: Communicating about Risks and Infant Feeding (WABA 2002); Materializing Thailand (2000); Women of Southeast Asia (Ed.,1996); and The Transformative Power of Cloth in Southeast Asia (Co-Ed., 1994).
Peter Vandergeest, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Geography
York University
Peter Vandergeest specializes in the areas of political ecology, environmental sociology and the cultural politics of environment and development.
His recent publication, co-edited with Chusak Whittayapak, is The Politics of Decentralization in Southeast Asia (Mekong Press 2009). He is also co-editor of Constructing the Countryside (1996) and has published a number of articles in refereed books and journals on resource rights, the social aspects of forestry, and the political ecology of shrimp aquaculture.
His current research focuses on governmentality and forest politics in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as well as and regulatory practices in shrimp aquaculture in Thailand and India. He is co-investigator in a SSRCH-MCRI project on 'Challenges of Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia' (2005-2010) and Principal Investigator for 'Privatizing Environmental Governance: A Global Analysis of the Effects and Effectiveness of Environmental Certification for Farmed Salmon and Shrimp', supported by SSHRC.
Bernard Wolf, PhD
Professor, Economics, Schulich School of Business
York University
Professor Wolf's areas of expertise include international trade and finance, multinational enterprises, strategic alliances, economic integration and trade/investment liberalization in North America, Europe and Asia. His research projects focus on China, Korea and Japan and the role they play in the world economy. He has published and presented several papers on the automotive industry, intellectual property rights, currency and exchange rate issues, joint ventures and international business.
Wendy Wong, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Design
York University
Wendy Wong is the author of Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (2002) published by Princeton Architectural Press. She has published four books for Chinese readers funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her articles appeared in Design Issues, Journal of Design History, Journal of Popular Culture, International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Gender Studies, Mass Communication and Society and Graphis Magazine.
Her curated exhibit, "Chinese Design. Everyday" was held at the Design Exchange, Toronto in Spring 2008. She served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1999 to 2000, and was the 2000 Lubalin Curatorial Fellow at the Cooper Union School of Art, where she curated an exhibit entitled "Chinese Graphic Design towards the International Sphere." In 1998, she was the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Grant, an affiliate of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. She received a SSHRC Standard Research Grant for her research on the history of Chinese graphic design in 2004. She taught in Hong Kong and the United States before she moved to York University.
Her research and teaching interests include: Chinese visual cultural history and studies, Asian comics and animation studies, Chinese mass media studies, Chinese consumer society, design and identity, design and public awareness, cross-cultural/hybrid design, emerging design technologies and lifestyle studies, globalization and transnational studies.
Yuk-lin Renita Wong, PhD
Associate Professor, School of Social Work
York University
Professor Yuk-Lin Renita Wong has worked to deconstruct the postcolonial and racial power relations in knowledge production and discursive practices in social work. Her publications include a critique of the discourse of spirituality in social work and of cultural competence. Her writings also focus on centering marginalized voices and ways of knowing/being, including mindfulness-based critical social work pedagogy, East and Southeast Asian immigrant/refugee women’s conceptions of mental health, and the indigenization of social work with women in China.
She is currently working with an ethno-specific mental health agency in developing a self-help initiative model for East and Southeast Asian mental health consumer/survivors. Internationally, she has served as International Consultant in a 'Women's Studies Curriculum Development in China' Project (2000-2005), and as Senior Scholar at the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University in Guangzhou, China (Fall 2005). She is currently involved in a participatory action research project on the post-disaster community rebuilding and cultural restoration of ethnic minority communities in one of the earthquake-afflicted areas in Sichuan China.
Lorna Wright, PhD
Associate Vice President, International
Associate Professor,
International Business
Schulich School of Business
York University
Lorna Wright has been active in cross-cultural and diversity consulting for over 30 years, offering training in cross-cultural and multicultural management and negotiations, as well as organizational development and strategy formulation. She has conducted seminars, given guest lectures and conference presentations around the world.
She is currently the Associate Vice-President, International at York University.
She is currently working on a research project on "Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) International Development and the Role of Electronic Networks" and Partnering Strategies for Canadian SMEs in Southeast Asia." She has published a number of case studies and articles on e-business, SME training strategies, women entrepreneurship, cultural competence, among others, and co-authored a book on International Management Behavior: Putting Policy into Practice (1992).
She was the founding director (1992-2000) of the Centre for Canada-Asia Business Relations at Queen's University. She was also co-founder (1997) of the Asian Business Consortium, which included Queen’s University, York University, the University of Toronto, and Ivey School of Business.
Xueqing Xu, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
York University
Dr. Xu holds a BA and MA in Chinese Literature from Fudan University in Shanghai, and a PhD in Chinese Literature from the University of Toronto (2000). She is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University. Her research interests are in Chinese-Canadian literature and Chinese women fiction. Her current research project is “From “Day of Shame” to “Canada Day”: Reflections on Chinese-Canadian Identity and Home in the Tai Hon Kong Bo/Chinese Times.”
Among her publications are A Life of Confucius (1990) and several articles on Chinese-Canadian literature during the past few years. She contributed ca. 500 entries to an encyclopedia of modern Chinese literature and a chapter to a book on Chinese literary societies during the Republican Era (2008). She also edited an anthology of prose by Chinese-Canadian writers in 2005.
She was the organizer of the 2010 International Symposium on Chinese-Canadian Literature, which was held at York University in July 2010.
Qiang Zha, PhD
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education
York University
Qiang Zha is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, York University. He holds a PhD in Higher Education, earned at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. As a Chevening Scholar, he received a Master of Art degree in Comparative Education from the University of London Institute of Education in 1994. In 1996, he was a visiting scholar to the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong.
His research interests include comparative higher/education, international academic relations, globalization and education, the internationalization of higher education, East Asian and Chinese higher education, differentiation and diversity in higher education, theories of organizational change, research methods in education, global brain circulation, global citizenship education, issues with new immigrants settlement. He has written and published widely on these topics. In 2004, he was a co-recipient of the UNESCO Palgrave Prize on Higher Education Policy Research.
In the past three years, Professor Zha focused his research on a SSHRC-supported project, 'China’s Move to Mass Higher Education: Implications for Democratization and Global Cultural Dialogue'. This project studied China’s move to mass higher education in terms of the policy making process and the empirical experience. Its major findings are reported in a book titled Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education, co-authored by Ruth Hayhoe, Jun Li, Jing Lin and Qiang Zha.
Qiang Zha is an affiliated member of the York Centre for Education and Community, and Centre of Excellence on Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) – The Ontario Metropolis Centre. He is also a concurrent professor/research fellow with Nanjing Normal University, Institute of Higher Education Studies at Fudan University, and Center for Development Studies of the Anhui Provincial Government in China.