IAFOR > The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies (ACCS) > ACCS2023

ACCS2023

May 19-22, 2023 | Held in Tokyo, Japan and Online

Between May 19-22, IAFOR hosted both The 13th Asian Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS2023) and The 13th Asian Conference on Cultural Studies (ACCS2023) at the Toshi Center Hotel in Tokyo. These parallel events illuminated the intricate intersections of Asian Studies and Cultural Studies, providing a multidisciplinary platform for scholars and professionals to delve deep into the rich tapestry of Asian cultures, histories, and contemporary issues.

Held in partnership with the IAFOR Research Centre at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, this international conference encourages academics and scholars to meet and exchange ideas and views in a forum stimulating respectful dialogue. This joint event exemplifies IAFOR’s internationalising mission, which brought together more than 250 delegates from 30 countries.

Virtual Presentations
Download ACCS2023 Conference Programme
Conference Proceedings
Conference Report

Back to Top

Programme

  • Grace and Tradition: Discovering the Beauty of Nihonbuyo
    Grace and Tradition: Discovering the Beauty of Nihonbuyo
    Cultural Presentation: Keisen University Nihonbuyo Club, Keisen University
  • Okinawa Eisa: The Dance Tradition of the Ryukyu Islands
    Okinawa Eisa: The Dance Tradition of the Ryukyu Islands
    Cultural Presentation: Okinawa Eisa Club, J.F. Oberlin University
  • Fusuma: The Art of Japanese Sliding Doors
    Fusuma: The Art of Japanese Sliding Doors
    Cultural Presentation: Todai Fusuma Club, University of Tokyo
  • There is No New Normal
    There is No New Normal
    Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall
  • Democratising Displacement: Paths to Political Inclusion for Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons
    Democratising Displacement: Paths to Political Inclusion for Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons
    Keynote Presentation: Max Pensky
  • Creating New Marine Protected Areas During Indonesia’s New Normal
    Creating New Marine Protected Areas During Indonesia’s New Normal
    Keynote Presentation: Alex Del Olmo
  • From “Normal” to the “New Normal” through to the “Abnormal”: Where Do We Place the Elderly on This Scale?
    From “Normal” to the “New Normal” through to the “Abnormal”: Where Do We Place the Elderly on This Scale?
    Keynote Presentation: Sue Ballyn
  • Environmental Communication and Public Engagement Through Creative Uses of Satellite Data
    Environmental Communication and Public Engagement Through Creative Uses of Satellite Data
    Keynote Presentation: Grayson Cooke

Back to Top

Speakers

  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    Barcelona University, Spain
  • Grayson Cooke
    Grayson Cooke
    Southern Cross University, Australia
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, USA
  • Alex del Olmo
    Alex del Olmo
    Underwater Filmmaker
  • Max Pensky
    Max Pensky
    Binghamton University, United States

Back to Top

Grace and Tradition: Discovering the Beauty of Nihonbuyo
Cultural Presentation: Keisen University Nihonbuyo Club, Keisen University

The Nihonbuyo club at Keisen University is a student organisation dedicated to the study and practice of Nihonbuyo, a traditional Japanese dance style. This is the ninth year the group has been in existence. Almost all members of the club have no experience, but are learning from Hanayagi Sukeyuuna, a professional Japanese dancer and graduate of Keisen. Today in Japan, the culture of wearing a kimono is disappearing and there are many Japanese who have never worn a yukata or kimono. For this reason, the students in the club have started learning how to put on a yukata by themselves. They also learn about the history and cultural significance of Japanese dance, as well as the costumes and music used in performances. The Nihonbuyo Club at Keisen provides a space for students to deepen their understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture through the art of dance. Members have the opportunity to perform at various events both on and off campus, further showcasing their passion and dedication to preserving and sharing this important cultural tradition.

Okinawa Eisa: The Dance Tradition of the Ryukyu Islands
Cultural Presentation: Okinawa Eisa Club, J.F. Oberlin University

The Okinawa Eisa Club at J.F. Oberlin University is a vibrant and active student organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Okinawan culture through dance and music. Eisa is a traditional folk dance from the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, characterised by dynamic drumming, chanting, and colourful costumes. The club is open to all students, regardless of their level of experience, and provides a welcoming community for those interested in learning and performing Eisa. Through their performances at various events on and off-campus, the Okinawa Eisa club helps to spread awareness and appreciation of Okinawan culture to a wider audience.

Fusuma: The Art of Japanese Sliding Doors
Cultural Presentation: Todai Fusuma Club, University of Tokyo

The Todai Fusuma Club is a student organisation based at the University of Tokyo, also known as Todai, in Japan. The club is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of traditional Japanese art, specifically the art of fusuma, which are sliding panels used to divide rooms in Japanese architecture. The club members learn how to repair and decorate fusuma using traditional techniques, such as painting with mineral pigments and gold leaf. The Todai Fusuma Club provides a space for students to connect with Japanese culture and history through hands-on practice and artistic expression.

There is No New Normal
Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

As we emerge from COVID and the requirements we all endured for masking, distancing, and curtailed travel, we have heard regularly that we have now entered a post-COVID "new normal." That term begs the question, of course, of what "old normal" is being referred to and how precisely we have deviated from it. It further obscures the fact that the queer theorist Michael Warner, in The Trouble with Normal from a quarter-century ago, rejected the whole notion of "normality," arguing that as a term, it has been used primarily as a means to assert control by dominant powers - normalising their interests - rather than to capture a widely common or desirable way of being.

So, was there in the years immediately pre-COVID a static and definable "normal" that then evolved radically into a "new" state over just 24 months or so? To put it bluntly, "no." The U.S.-based Pew Research Center has joined others in addressing this topic directly, concluding that our supposed "new normal" is really only an intensification of trends already present well before the pandemic: worsening social inequality, deepening mistrust of authority, science, and fact, and a turn toward authoritarianism as populations reject diversity, inclusion, and demands for social justice. Yes, we may have seen an appreciable uptick in remote work and online delivery of education, but even those simply meant more isolation and less immediate interaction with those unlike ourselves, and therefore worsened all of the social threats just mentioned.

To proclaim a "new normal" is at best a form of wishful thinking that a definitive break has occurred with a past that is viewed most often with nostalgia but at other times with distaste or condescension. It absolves us from reckoning with long-standing injustice and our own culpability in entrenched patterns of violence against the disenfranchised. It allows us to see ourselves and our quotidian lives as having endured something cataclysmic, emerging then phoenix-like, changed irrevocably. If we are living in the "new," then we no longer have to reckon with the "old," including long-standing and continuing crimes against others' selfhoods. The concept of a "new normal," in effect, absolves us of responsibility.

Instead of wasting time by celebrating or reviling a "new normal," we should work instead to document the trends that the pandemic magnified and trace down the intensified threats to civil society and economic security that have arisen because of or in response to the pandemic. This does not hinge on the concept of anything radically "new," rather it posits an incrementalist model of deepening fears of difference and desperate reassertions of old ideologies—a toxic, continuing normalisation of intolerance and indifference. As U.S. politicians wage renewed war on transgender youth and what they deride as "critical race theory" and "woke" culture, the old norms seem very much alive and all too present.

Read presenter's biography
Democratising Displacement: Paths to Political Inclusion for Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons
Keynote Presentation: Max Pensky

The world is experiencing a crisis of forced displacement. The global population of persons displaced from their communities by armed conflict, persecution, atrocity risk, natural disasters, economic desperation, climate change, or some combination of all these factors, has doubled over the last ten years to a record of over 100 million in 2022 – equivalent to the sixth most populous nation on earth.

A routinely overlooked factor unites this enormous and diverse populace – even when fleeing from authoritarian or failed states and arriving at democratic ones, displaced persons experience a comprehensive exclusion from democratic politics. Even in cases where the host country is relatively welcoming, it frequently regards its population of displaced persons as passive, needy recipients that require aid and government services. Translated into refugee policy, this view of displaced persons contributes to the loss of individual and collective political agency that the displaced have already experienced. Often greeted with fear and suspicion, displaced groups' own initiatives for self-organisation and agency frequently fail.

Displaced persons need access to democracy. But what paths are open to more inclusion? What novel political and policy experiments might identify these paths? What could help build host countries' political will to accept more democratic inclusion of their refugee populations?

Read presenter's biography
Creating New Marine Protected Areas During Indonesia’s New Normal
Keynote Presentation: Alex Del Olmo

During the COVID-19 pandemic, societies all over the world were facing not only a health problem but also an economic crisis, and Indonesia was no exception. The Indonesian government, led by President Joko Widodo, tried to implement self-contained regulations to control the spread of the virus while simultaneously closing Indonesian borders to everyone except nationals and foreign workers returning to the country. As tourism came to a halt, scuba diving activities dropped nearly to zero.

In this context, something truly unique happened. For the first time in over 25 years, there were almost no divers, and only a handful of liveaboards were taking trips where they used to bring thousands of guests to the most remote areas in Indonesia. However, this left some Marine Protected Areas unguarded, and locals were trying to survive with no income as their jobs in the tourism industry vanished.

In November 2020 and later in November 2021, during Indonesia's "New Normal," one of those liveaboards - The Seven Seas - partnered with a conservation team from the Coral Triangle Centre (CTC) and Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara (YKAN) to create a community-based program that could protect some of the most vulnerable coral reefs in the Forgotten Islands and the Banda Sea, as well as document the fish life.

Accessible only during the short seasonal gap of calm winds between the Southeast and Northwest monsoon, the Forgotten Islands (also known as the Southeast Moluccas) comprise an arc of islands stretching 1,000 kilometres from Timor to West Papua. Their relative isolation and the often stormy seas throughout the year mean that they are some of the least visited and explored islands in all of Indonesia, making them the ideal place to create new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

Read presenter's biography
From “Normal” to the “New Normal” through to the “Abnormal”: Where Do We Place the Elderly on This Scale?
Keynote Presentation: Sue Ballyn

What exactly is the “New Normal”? While it is a post-pandemic term that has come into use across the world, do we really understand it? What is clear is that it means many different things depending on individuals and communities, and possibly no consensus of opinion as to its exact meaning can be reached.

My personal opinion is that the "New Normal" represents a shift away from pre-pandemic norms and towards a future that may look and feel different in many ways. As a term, it is porous and may be assigned a meaning by individuals, institutions etc. or, more dangerously, politicians and governments.

With regard to the elderly, the “new normal” is a term which lies embedded in government policy resulting in a collision between care for the elderly and the limits of budgets assigned to it, thus possibly, or indeed provenly, resulting in discrimination with regards to what kind of treatment may or may not be awarded to an elderly person within the public health system.

As a member of the elderly community, I want to look at some of the “abnormal” things that have been going on before, during and after Covid19. The pandemic has worsened the situation of the elderly and has enabled a much wider generational rift. It is not a case of ageism alone but a much more subtly brutal affair which begins with our governments and trickles down to today’s youth.

Read presenter's biography
Environmental Communication and Public Engagement Through Creative Uses of Satellite Data
Keynote Presentation: Grayson Cooke

I am an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist, with a focus on how art and science can work together to develop new figurations of environmental change, its causes and its impacts. In particular, I focus on how Earth Observation satellite data can be used towards this end. While satellite imaging is used extensively and primarily within scientific, governmental and private sector contexts, there is enormous potential when it is taken up across disciplinary boundaries and when aesthetic and affective dimensions are added to scientific frameworks. Responding to the “vulnerabilities” sub-theme of this conference, in this talk I will explore what satellite imaging can show us of the fragility, resilience and remarkable formal beauty of human and non-human environments. I will outline some of my projects and methods, demonstrating how critical and creative uses of satellite data can engage the public and bring new insights into environmental phenomena.

Read presenter's biography
Sue Ballyn
Barcelona University, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986, she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian poetry, the first PhD on Australian literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation in 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990, she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory-Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25, 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University, Spain, which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020, a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures

Previous Presentations

Spotlight Presentation (2017) | “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Grayson Cooke
Southern Cross University, Australia

Biography

Born in New Zealand and based in Australia, Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar, media artist and Associate Professor of Media at Southern Cross University. Grayson has presented media art and live audio-visual performance works in Australia and internationally, having exhibited and performed in major international festivals such as the Japan Media Arts Festival, the WRO Media Art Biennale and the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York. He works regularly with scientific tools and materials to explore new ways of understanding and exploring the environment and human impacts upon it. As a scholar he has published widely in academic journals on topics including art-science collaboration and creative research methods. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montreal.

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and The Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of the IAFOR Academic Governing Board.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | The Work of the University in Perilous Times

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2023) | There Is No New Normal
Keynote Presentation (2020) | Dislocation/Invitation
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
Keynote Presentation (2018) | The Cities We Fled
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Alex del Olmo
Underwater Filmmaker

Biography

With an interest in underwater life from a very young age, Alex became a certified diver at the age of 18.

Having earned a degree in Audiovisual Communication, two master's degrees in Creative Documentary and Production & Directing in Audiovisual Fiction, as well as a PhD in Cinema and Audiovisuals, Alex's academic background provided a solid foundation to work in the realm of television, film and documentary-making for over 25 years.

Alex secured full-time tenure as a PhD Professor at the Tecnocampus-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, but ultimately decided to pursue his dream of travelling and filming in the Indo-Pacific, where he became the cruise director for the renowned Seven Seas liveaboard. This proved to be a perfect fit, allowing him to combine his passion with his work as an underwater cameraman for production companies, television and documentaries.

Alex has been filming underwater for over 15 years, logged over 8,000 dives, and has a theoretical background that is unique in the underwater profession. As such, he has mastered the audiovisual arts to create compelling stories specialising in filming all kinds of marine life in the most challenging underwater environments worldwide.

Alex's work earned him awards from prestigious underwater image festivals all over the world, and his films have been broadcast on a variety of national and international television networks worldwide.

Max Pensky
Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Max Pensky is Co-Director of the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) at Binghamton University, the State University of New York, United States, where he is also a Professor of Philosophy. He oversees multiple research initiatives at I-GMAP, including projects on forced displacement and international refugee law. His published research focuses on international criminal law, transitional justice, and political theory. His books include Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2018) (with Wendy Brown and Peter Gordon), The Ends of Solidarity (State University of New York Press, 2009), and Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (University of Massachusetts Pr, 1993). He has held fellowships at Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, Cornell University, and Oxford University.