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Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:48:13 +0000

Kinship may not mean what you think it does Elizabeth Williams Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:48 Bradley Worrell

The original version of this article appeared in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

CU Boulder anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

Historically, anthropologists defining kinship tended to begin with who people are related to by birth and by marriage. Family was often considered a bedrock of society.

Over time, the idea of what constitutes kinship has evolved, but a key underlying assumption has remained largely unchanged when it comes to the idea of families being a source of caregiving support, says Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the ��Ƶ Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on social relationships, including kinship.

“The literature in anthropological scholarship on families often still supports this notion that, definitionally, family is what keeps us together,” she says. “There is a perception that kinship is where social solidarity lies, how social continuity works, how society hangs together.”

The problem with that idea, Goldfarb says, is that empirical data, including Goldfarb’s own fieldwork in Japan connected to the child-welfare system, often contradicts that idealistic portrayal. That, in turn, posed a problem when assigning readings to her students.

“As I’ve taught kinship over the years, I had this increasing sense that many of my students don’t see themselves reflected in the literature,” she says. “We often talk about diversifying our syllabi, making sure that the authors come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse perspectives. That was really lacking in the materials that I had available to assign to students, because a lot of the reading doesn’t take serious the fact that some people’s lives with their families are really problematic and really hard.”

Goldfarb’s solution was to spearhead the book Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Goldfarb led the conceptualization of the book’s theme, served as co-editor and co-author of the introduction, and wrote one of the chapters.

As Goldfarb and her co-author, Sandra Bamford, note in the book’s introduction, “If family is, by definition, about nurturing and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?” The authors do not attempt to redefine kinship, but instead seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to the field.

Recently, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Goldfarb about the book. Her responses were lightly edited for style and condensed.

Question: What is kinship, exactly? And how has the idea of kinship changed over time?

Goldfarb: The term ‘kinship’ is fairly academic and is taken to mean the systematic level of family relationships. In the old anthropology literature, it was about trying to discern what sort of kinship system each society had, allowing researchers to produce a systematic understanding of how people reckoned their social ties.

One of the reasons anthropologists cared about this was that they believed ‘primitive’ societies didn’t have politics; they just had kinship. Anthropologists were often tasked by colonial governments to determine these key social structures so colonizers could more effectively govern. …

From my perspective, now when we talk about kinship and anthropology, it is about how we think about relatedness more broadly—beyond just heterosexual reproduction and marriage. For example, if I ask my students to depict their own kinship networks, they may draw a genealogy, but when you actually find out what their real relationships are like, those may not be reflected in either their genealogies or legal documents. …

If you are just basing things on genealogy, you’re not seeing the foster child who is part of a family; depending on the local legal regime, you may not be seeing the same-sex couple; you’re not seeing the ghost of the grandmother who is still a part of a family’s daily life. These are all aspects of human life that you wouldn’t actually see if you are just looking at relationships that map onto a normative genealogy. So, definitionally, we need to be more open-minded about the ways that we categorize social relationships in order to analyze them.

Question: And the book specifically grapples with the idea that familial kinship doesn’t always carry the positives that many people tend to associate with it, correct?

Goldfarb: A very stubborn assumption continues to exist in both the academic literature and the popular imagination that kin ties are—or should be—loving, forever, unconditional and nurturing, and that the obligation to care should exist in perpetuity. The chapters presented in this collection paint a different picture.

In Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, authors seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to studying kinship.

In the ‘Ambiguities of Care’ section, we were thinking about situations where normative frameworks of caregiving were destabilized in some way, which often meant that care was delegated to nonfamilial others—so, either the carceral, the child welfare system, long-term care facilities or medical systems. …

For example, one essay looked at recidivism rates for older adults in Japan, where people tend to commit petty crimes so they can be re-arrested and incarcerated, as prison offers more comfort than life ‘outside’ if their family is not able to care for them. In those cases, they find being incarcerated more ‘homey’ than being at home.

The section ‘Toxic States’ is about the ways state formations shape the types of relationships that are possible, or that people produce in spite of these state formations. So, for example, one of the essays is about people who have been incarcerated after being caught at the U.S. border, and how American border policies impact kinship relationships and possibilities for connection and disconnection.

And the third section is ‘Negative Affects.’ The main idea in that section is that types of affect or emotion that are often considered negative, like anger or envy or favoritism, are actually constitutive aspects of how we understand ourselves in relation with others. …

My own essay, in that last section, talks about how in child-welfare contexts, the idea may be that family is a dangerous place; when children have been removed from their homes, it may be because their family of origin is not safe for them. From my fieldwork in Japan with child welfare institutions, I observed that one of the goals of those spaces was to produce what I call ‘sanitized relationality’—something that was not family, that was safe, not contaminated by arguments or worry and everyone was equal and was treated the same.

The argument I make in the essay is that that type of relationship is not the sort that helps people understand in adulthood how to maintain social ties. If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things. So, it’s hard to grow up in a situation like that and know how to have relationships. To be able to argue with someone and still continue that relationship is a type of privilege.

Question: By extension, it seems that when kinship works like people envision it’s supposed to, it should be recognized and maybe respected because it’s not automatically the norm?

Goldfarb: Exactly. At least, the recognition that kinship relationships that feel positive and good take a lot of work; there is nothing natural or automatic about kinship ties being caring or based upon positive sociality.

Question: How did the idea for this book come together?

Goldfarb: We had proposed a session for the 2020 American Anthropological Association conference, which ended up being canceled because of COVID. … When the conference was cancelled, we decided to do two online workshops instead. For that, we had people send in drafts, and we grouped the participants in thematic groups. …

"If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things."

We asked the authors to think about: What irritates you about the way kinship has been talked about in the literature? How can you think against the grain of typical arguments? …

For the volume as a whole, I wanted something that would be accessible to undergrads and good materials for graduate students; something that would be ethnographically rich and also theoretically exciting. We wanted these to be short, delicious essays of between 4,300 and 6,000 words, which is quite short for academic articles. …

And one thing that I love about the book is that there’s such diversity in the contributors. Some of them are junior grad students and others are emeritus professors.

Question: Who is the intended audience for this book? And, have there been any reactions to it thus far?

Goldfarb: As an academic press, it’s probably academics in general who are the audience. So, undergrad students, graduate students and faculty. But I also feel the essays are quite accessible, so I really hope that people beyond academia read it.

I taught portions of the book this fall in my undergraduate Kinship seminar, and the students have reacted really positively to it; some of them said they found it very validating of their own experiences.

We did a book launch on Oct. 24, where the first half was a cabaret performance by Ronan Viard, who is French actor and singer who lives in Boulder. His story is exactly what the book is about. It was about him being abducted by his father and brought from France to the United States when he was a child. The story is about his experiences with that, but it’s also about his relationship to the United States, where he lives now, and his relationship with his father after all these years, and his children’s relationship with his father.

It was a powerful performance, and it brought up all these questions that were at the center of the book, like: How do you grapple with the types of family inheritances, including inherited trauma, that are perhaps unwelcome but hard to escape?

Ronan’s cabaret also raises questions about belonging that are very anthropological: How do we theorize belonging? How do we think about belonging to a nation or to a family or a community or to a language?

Kathryn Goldfarb’s solo-authored ethnography, Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-being in Japan, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

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CU Boulder religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:38:14 +0000

CU Boulder religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse Elizabeth Williams Mon, 06/02/2025 - 12:38 Bradley Worrell

The original version of this article appeared in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Associate Professor Aun Hasan Ali’s book about Islam’s School of Hillah explores the dynamics and formation of Twelver Shi’ism, arguing that the faith was open to diverse intellectual traditions

Twelver Shi’ism, the largest branch of Shi’ite Islam, tends to be viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, particularly as seen through the lens of the ideology of the Iranian government.

Aun Hasan Ali, associate professor in the ��Ƶ Department of Religious Studies whose area of focus is on Islamic intellectual history, particularly pre-modern Twelver Shi’i traditions, says he believes that modern perceptions of the faith have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

“It was an unprecedented moment in a lot of ways, because for the first time in the history of Shi’ism, you had a theory of government where the jurist was the head of the state,” he says. “Traditionally, there was always a kind of separation between those two spheres.”

As a result, Ali says the idea took root among some in the West and also in the Muslim Sunni tradition that Shi’i clerics were free to make whatever political or religious decisions they pleased, because they were not bound by the history of tradition. However, that’s not an accurate portrayal of how jurists and other followers come to decisions in Twelver Shi’i religious tradition, he adds.

Instead, Ali makes the case that Twelver Shi’ism is better understood as a “discursive tradition,” which, as defined by noted cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, involves researching foundational Islamic texts, such as the Quran and the writings of exemplary historical Shi’i religious figures, for context. Ali says his own definition of discursive tradition is tied less to foundational texts and more to how noted Shi’i religious figures interpreted those texts, as that is how most followers of the faith first engage on religious topics.

“In the same way that someone addressing ethics in contemporary philosophy needs to address (Immanuel) Kant, for instance, I view that as a parameter of the conversation,” he explains. “Similarly, when it comes to Islamic tradition, there are important figures that one needs to address. So, in the simplest terms, a discursive tradition should be thought of as a conversation across time and space among experts.”

In contrast to the idea that scholars make decisions based solely upon their authority, Ali contends that thinking of the Twelver Shi’i faith as a discursive tradition means the faith continually remains open to discussion, debate, mediation and modification.

Ali’s ideas on discursive tradition were shaped in part by his PhD dissertation on the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions, while also being open to integrating diverse intellectual traditions, during its formative years, from the 12th to 14th centuries. Ali’s revised dissertation was published in 2023 by I.B. Taurus as the book, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution.

Recently, Ali spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about the importance of the School of Hillah in the formation of Twelver Shi’ism and its profound effect on the Shi’i faith today. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Why does the School of Hillah take root in what is now southern Iraq?

Ali: Hillah becomes a center of scholarship for two reasons. One is that you have a (regional) Shi’i dynasty come to power that patronizes these scholars. The second reason is that you have the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which pushes a lot of people looking to escape that devastation southward.

So, you end up with a concentration of scholars who are sought-after in the region. People travel to Hillah from the Levant, from Bahrain and from Iran. They travel there because they were seeking expert education, and the major figures of Hillah were the undisputed experts. (Students) came there to receive that kind of education in the same way that today somebody might come to CU seeking a world-class program in astrophysics. The same thing was happening in Hillah; they came there to learn from these masters.

With the Mongol invasion, sure, there’s devastation, but there are also opportunities. There are trade routes that enrich particular families in the area, and, as we all know, education requires money, so the influx of wealth also becomes a reason why they’re able to offer patronage to those scholars.

Question: Is the School of Hillah equivalent to what we would think of today as a university or maybe a seminary?

Ali: Certainly, it’s different in the sense that it’s not primarily organized in brick-and-mortar institutions. It’s more unstructured. Classes took place in the home of an individual, a prominent scholar.

It’s similar in the sense of curriculum. What I mean is that certain texts come to be understood as definitive of a tradition. And that’s part of the reason why Hillah is so important. A lot of the texts that we think of today as being definitive of Shi’i tradition were written in Hillah and continue to be studied today, so we can think of it in terms of there is, not uniformity, but an expectation that anybody who masters this tradition would read these texts. In that sense, it’s similar.

It’s also similar in the sense of structures of authority. Just as someone wishing to put forth a view in, let’s say, American jurisprudence, has to engage particular jurists; similarly, somebody wishing to put forward a view in Shi’i theology has to engage with the views of particular jurists. So, structures of authority can be similar in that way. The idea of a curriculum can be similar in that way, but it’s not organized as a single space in primarily brick-and-mortar institutions.

That was actually one of the points in the book. The organizing principle of the School of Hillah is these large families in which particular types of expertise is concentrated. So, one family may have an expertise in genealogy; another family may have an expertise in philosophy; while another family may have an expertise in law. These large families (in the community) structure the School of Hillah. And, of course, people intermarry between these families, so it becomes a network of intellectuals.

Question: For the students who completed their studies at Hillah, did they generally go on to become clerics and religious scholars?

Ali: If we look at the contemporary Twelver Shi’i tradition, it runs the full gamut. Before you have modern schools, people learn basic numeracy and literacy in religious institutions, which is the same as it was in the West.

Some of those people, after getting basic literacy and numeracy, go on to become merchants or preachers, for example. A smaller group will become teachers within the institution, and then a (small percentage) of those will become the next generation of masters of the tradition. Most people don’t reach that level, because it takes a long time—we’re talking maybe 20 years or more—to be considered competent within that tradition. It’s a very grueling process, and most people leave before they finish the entire process.

Question: Can you talk about how your idea of discursive tradition contrasts with the idea of jurists having the authority to make whatever decisions they want?

Ali: That’s exactly the idea I was pushing back against in the book—this kind of free-for-all idea about authority. That’s not to say authority isn’t important, or that jurists don’t exercise that kind of authority. But again, they do it within the horizons of possibility that are shaped by discursive tradition, as a conversation across space and time.

And yes, there’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead.

Question: Were there any major developments or contributions that came out of the School of Hillah that made a profound impact on Islam today?

Ali: Philosophy becoming integrated into theology is something that we can look to Hillah for, within the Shi’i world. That development takes place earlier within the Sunni world, but in the Shi’i world, Avicenna’s philosophy, or Avicenna’s metaphysics, comes to be integrated into Shi’i theology. In that time period, the integration of mysticism into Shi’ism is also something that happens in Hillah.

"There’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead."

When we think of (Islamic) law, that’s really one of the most important contributions that happens at Hillah, and you see the integration of advanced mathematics and advanced science into law. For example, in Islamic law, figuring out the direction of prayer from a distance, given the curvature of the earth is also a complicated thing, which leads to advanced discussions of science and mathematics integrated into the chapter on ritual prayer, for instance. Those would be a few examples.

At Hillah, you also have the production of these kinds of biographical dictionaries. So, when Muslims evaluate a piece of information, part of the way they evaluate it is by looking at who communicated that information. You can imagine that it would be very useful to have a kind of a biographical dictionary, where you could look up a particular individual and see what they were like. Were they known to be somebody who had scholarly expertise? Were they known to be somebody who was an upright person? Or were they known to be unscrupulous in the way that they narrated information? These kinds of biographical dictionaries, which facilitate legal discussions and conversations, were produced at Hillah.

Question: Despite the School of Hillah’s contributions to Islamic thought, you say there is not much scholarship about it. Why do you think that is?

Ali: I believe a lot of it has to do with the history of Islamic studies in the West—and that only in recent years has Shi’ism gotten the attention it deserved. Previously, scholars who studied Islam largely dealt with Sunni sources. And so, even when they talked about Shi’ism, they were talking about it through the lens of Sunni authors and Sunni sources.

This is despite the fact that Shi’ites—while making up somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the (Muslim) population—their contributions, intellectually, to Islamic tradition has been disproportionate.

Things started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, but even among scholars focused on Shi’ism, they have tended to focus on its origins, or trying to explain how the Iranian Revolution happened, so in both of those ways Hillah was ignored.

Question: Do you have any particular hopes for your book?

Ali: In general, the book has been received well. I think that people (in Islamic studies) recognize this was a crucial period in Shi’i religious history that hadn’t really been sketched out the way I did in the book.

In terms of contributing to a broader discussion, my hope is the book brings together theoretical conversations in religious studies with meticulous historical scholarship. In Islamic studies, it’s sometimes separated by people who do theoretically rigorous projects and people who do meticulous historical scholarship. I tried to do both, and I hope that the book contributes to bridging the gap between these two different approaches within Islamic studies.

Aun Hasan Ali, CU Boulder associate professor of religious studies, argues that modern perceptions of Twelver Shi'ism have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

In The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution, author Aun Hasan Ali explores the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions.

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Women on trial speak clearly through their clothing

Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:55:03 +0000

Women on trial speak clearly through their clothing Elizabeth Williams Tue, 05/27/2025 - 08:55 Collette Mace

This article was originally posted in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

CU Boulder researcher Carla Jones finds that what Indonesian women wear in court can convey messages of piety and shame, or just the appearance of them

No matter who you are and what clothes you have on, you have probably, at some point, thought about how what you wear affects how you are seen.

Fashion is an important mode of self-expression, but it can also be a significant component of social communication. ��Ƶ anthropology Professor Carla Jones’ recently published research focusing on fashion within the Indonesian criminal justice system illustrates how appearance can be a public and personal feature of social and political communication.

Jones’ interest in Indonesia started when she visited the country in college, but her youth in Southeast Asia also played a part in her sustained interest in the culture there. As an anthropologist, she says, she is interested in diversity–in which Indonesian culture and social life is rich.

She also credits her interest in learning to speak Indonesian with her total immersion there. “Learning a new language can change your life,” she says. “Cultural anthropologists need to be able to ask questions and understand. You have to learn how to be an insider and an outsider at once.”

In the past two decades, public political culture in Indonesia has become increasingly focused on corruption. Although Indonesia is not unusually corrupt, many of the most visible corruption trials have captivated public attention through media focus on theft of public funds.

Jones noticed that when women were accused of corruption, they faced intense scrutiny about their appearances, both before and during their trials. Jones says she noticed that female defendants in corruption cases adjusted their clothing in ways that went far beyond the public norms for the majority-Muslim country.

Modesty was a particularly compelling visual strategy. Although modest styles are increasingly popular globally (think: trad-wife trends on TikTok), the styles that accused Indonesian women adopted for trials were especially visible when they appeared in court and were very different from their styles of dress prior to their trials, Jones says.

Many women, she says, would elect to wear facial coverings, called a niqab or cadar, when appearing before a judge. Wearing a niqab is not especially common in Indonesia. Jones argues in her paper that women choosing to express their religion so outwardly was also an effort to appear more pious and ashamed of their actions (or more innocent) to judges and to the public.

Niqab in court

So, does it work? According to Jones, yes, along with other factors. The women in these cases who wore a niqab to court tended to get shorter prison sentences than others did. “Their attorneys also did a really good job conveying that they are mothers, and their justification was to provide for their children,” she says.

However, that doesn’t mean these women on trial were received the same way all over the world. When Anniesa Hasibuan, an internationally famous modest-fashion designer who was charged with fraud, took the stand in West Java, the coverage expanded to all over the world, including the United States.

The international coverage of Hasibuan’s trial called additional attention to her choice to wear a niqab. Some Indonesians who were following her case closely viewed her choice to cover her face much as some Americans might: as an attempt to foreclose transparency about her appearance and therefore her finances. Many Indonesians viewed her appearance as a sign of dishonesty rather than piety.

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Asia Symposium 2025 — InterAsian Circulations April 11, 2025

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 19 May 2025 15:45:14 +0000

Asia Symposium 2025 — InterAsian Circulations April 11, 2025 Elizabeth Williams Mon, 05/19/2025 - 09:45 Rachel Rinaldo

This year's Asia Symposium examined the historic and contemporary connections within and beyond Asia, with attention to phenomena such as migration, religious and cultural movements, and political/economic connections.

The first panel, on Religious and Social movements, investigated the contours of several contemporary social movements and their transnational connections. Yi-Ling Chen (University of Wyoming) compared the social housing movements in Taiwan and South Korea and explored how they have influenced each other. Dheepa Sundaram (University of Denver) discussed how the contemporary Hindutva movement has taken shape in digital spaces and involved both diasporic connections and linkages with US right wing and white supremacist movements. Neda Shaban (CU Boulder) discussed the anti-hijab movement in Iran and how it has been shaped by diasporic politics.

The second panel, on Migration and Refugee Circulations, explored migration from the perspective of Asian societies. David Cook-Martin (CU Boulder) discussed the migration of Indian indentured workers to Mauritius and the West Indies and how this created legal and institutional templates for temporary labor migration that continue to shape global mobility patterns today. Jerry Jacka (CU Boulder) talked about how resource extraction and climate change in Papua New Guinea have reshaped traditional forms of internal migration and circulation. Shae Frydenlund (CU Boulder) discussed her research on Rohingya refugee women in Malaysia and how they have used online platforms to make money and supplement their families' meager income.

In his keynote, Ismail Fajrie Alatas (NYU) discussed the history of alternative forms of circulation and mobility of Muslim Sufi scholars across the Indian ocean. He argued that their concept of wilāya, which encapsulates ideas about friendship across territoriality, offers a vision of a trans-regional geography shaped by protection, care, hospitality, and grace. Thinking with this concept opens up a fresh perspective on circulations across Asia, past and present.

The 2025 Asia Symposium was made possible by the National Resource Center/FLAS grant from the US Department of Education.

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Very Successful "A Feminist Lens on Global China" Colloquium

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 12 May 2025 15:55:48 +0000

Very Successful "A Feminist Lens on Global China" Colloquium Elizabeth Williams Mon, 05/12/2025 - 09:55 Robert Wyrod

With generous support from the Center for Asian Studies, the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the ��Ƶ was able to host a one-day colloquium on feminist perspectives on Global China as part of the Department's 50th Anniversary celebration. The rise of China as a new global economic and political force has spurred the rapid growth of the field of Global China studies. Yet, research focused on gender and sexuality remains quite limited. This colloquium was a rare event that brought together an international group of scholars to help foster more robust feminist perspectives on Global China. Scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, China, Zimbabwe, and South Africa participated in the event. The three panels covered a wide range of issues related to Global China, including labor relations, intimate relationships, and cultural representations. The event was well attended by students, faculty, and staff and a virtual component allowed many more people to attend from around the world. The panelists are currently exploring ways to share the insights from the event more widely, including a special journal issue that could help spark more research on the gender and sexual dynamics of Global China.

Speaker(s):

Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA
Marie Berry, University of Denver
Yoon Jung Park, Georgetown
Mingwei Huang, Dartmouth
Sisasenkosi Mataruse, University of Zimbabwe
Prolific Mataruse, University of Zimbabwe
Vivian Lu, Rice
Ivy Gikonyo, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Charlotte Goodburn, King’s College London
Soumya Mishra, King’s College London
Matthew Chin, University of Virginia
Yiping Cai, UC Irvine
Eram Ashraf, Swansea University, UK
Xinlei Sha, Cornell
Justin Haruyama, University of British Colombia
Xianan Jin, University of Exeter, UK
Colloquium organizer: Robert Wyrod, Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies Department and International Affairs Program, CU Boulder

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Center for Asian Studies Student and Faculty Achievements

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:02:24 +0000

Center for Asian Studies Student and Faculty Achievements Elizabeth Williams Mon, 05/05/2025 - 09:02

Asian Studies Graduates

B. A. in Asian Studies

Tae Chapmann Minors: History and Korean
Lily Elliott Second Major: B.S. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Chloe Nowak Additional Majors: Psychology, Chinese Language and Civilization, Leadership and Community Engagement
Light Scheppy Second Major: Japanese Language and Literature; Minor: Korean
Sanskriti Shrestha Minors: Chinese, Japanese, Leadership Studies
Elena Wilson Second Major: Political Science

Asian Studies Minor

Elizabeth Craig Majors: Political Science and History
Shelby Glenn Majors: History and International Affairs; Second Minor: Classics
Aidan Vance Major: History

Certificate in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies

Luke Stumpfl Major: Anthropology; Minor: Geography

CAS Student Awards

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships

Graduate Student Fellows 2024-25 Academic Year

Aaron Bhatoya Hindi (History)
Jeanne Cho Japanese (History)
Nicholas Christoffersen Korean (Mathematics)
Jake Fischer Japanese (ALC)
Nicolas Jones Japanese (History)
Emily Swertfeger Arabic (History)

Graduate Student Fellows Summer 2025

Geneieve Hauer Chinese (Religious Studies)
Jessica Misiorek Japanese (Anthropology)
Casey Ringer Japanese (History)

Undergraduate Student Fellows Summer 2025

Malia Donoghue Chinese (Integrative Physiology)
Ian Comer Japanese (ALC)

Edward G. Seidensticker Japan Summer 2025 Research Grants

Ivan-Daniel Espinosa Theatre and Performance Studies
Ubochi Igbokwe Ethnomusicology

Japanese Studies Scholarship Fellows 2024-2025 Academic Year

Brandon Edwards Asian Languages and Civilizations
Evelyn Emery Asian Languages and Civilizations
Haruka Fujii Asian Languages and Civilizations
Sam Hensley Art and Art History
Lillith Jackson Asian Languages and Civilizations
Nicholas Jones History
Jessica Misiorek Anthropology
Casey Ringer History
Nyla Schaberg Asian Languages and Civilizations
Mikhail Skovoronskikh Asian Languages and Civilizations
Raisa Stebbins Asian Languages and Civilizations
Juliana Valverde Asian Languages and Civilizations
Taoxuan Xu Asian Languages and Civilizations

CAS Faculty Awards

Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant

Dwi Purwanto Indonesian Language Instruction

Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum Course Development Grant

Nidhi Arya Asian Languages and Civilizations

Asian Studies Course Development Grants

Brianne Cohen Art & Art History
Lauren Collins Asian Studies
Shae Frydenlund Asian Studies
Miriam Kadia Kingsburg History
Daryl Maude Asian Languages and Civilizations
Jianmin Shao Ethnic Studies
Molly Todd Sociology

Join us for the Center for Asian Studies commencement and celebration of student and faculty achievement on Friday, May 9 at 1:30 p.m. in the CASE Building, 4th floor.

Congratulations!

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Asian Studies Senior Research Showcase

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 15:38:50 +0000

Asian Studies Senior Research Showcase Elizabeth Williams Mon, 04/28/2025 - 09:38

Tuesday April 29, 12:30pm-1:30pm
CASE E351

Join us for lunch and a poster presentation session highlighting the exceptional work of undergraduate student research on Asia’s histories, cultures, and pressing contemporary issues. This event celebrates academic curiosity and provides a platform for the next generation of scholars making meaningful contributions to our understanding of Asia.

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CUBASGA 2025: The 26th Anniversary

Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:14:05 +0000

CUBASGA 2025: The 26th Anniversary Elizabeth Williams Tue, 04/22/2025 - 15:14 Taoxuan Xu

The 26th CU Boulder Asian Studies Graduate Association (CUBASGA) annual conference was held successfully over the weekend of 22 and 23 February 2025. CUBASGA is one of the largest graduate student conferences in the field of Asian Studies and is run entirely by graduate students from the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. We provide a platform for MA and PhD students to present their papers, receive feedback from faculty and fellow students, as well as make interdisciplinary connections within the broad field of Asian Studies.

This year, we had nearly forty student speakers from prestigious institutions all around the world sharing their research across 11 panels over two days. On top of our visiting student speakers, we also had 20 speakers from CU Boulder, all hailing from various departments. Students from the CU Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies presented their findings, which facilitated lively multidisciplinary discussions throughout the course of the conference. We also invited two distinguished scholars as our keynote speakers: Professor Ronald Egan from Stanford University and Professor David C. Atherton from Harvard University.

Professor Egan’s keynote address placed the extensive oeuvre of 11th-Century poet and essayist Su Shi in the spotlight. Specifically, how should we read a collection of hundreds of texts, spanning multiple genres, all authored by the same individual? While many existing compilations group these texts by genre, Professor Egan proposed selecting and reordering the individual texts chronologically, thus reading these texts alongside Su Shi’s life progression. His fascinating talk highlighted how new connections can be drawn from a careful and well-considered reorganization of the oeuvre. Prof. Atherton gave a talk on a story written by Japanese Edo period writer, scholar, and poet Ueda Akinari in the last years of his life, which sheds light on a transformative period for waka poetry in the late eighteenth century. He shed light on the transition of waka poetry, from being the cultural property of aristocrats to a genre studied and experimented upon by people from all walks of life. Professor Atherton’s presentation invited the audience to reflect upon the composition of poetry, as well as the transmission of creative teaching. Both talks were followed by spirited discussions with questions asked by both graduate students and faculty members.

Moreover, the attendees of this year’s CUBASGA were not limited to faculty, staff, and graduate students. Undergraduate students from our Chinese and Japanese language classes, as well as students in STEM majors were also present, listening to presentations and participating in lively discussions. After the conference, attendees were invited to our post-conference dinner at You & Mee Noodle House, where speakers and professors were able to interact in a less formal setting. Many of them continued their debates and established stronger connections with one another.

This year’s CUBASGA was a great success based on the feedback and messages we have heard and received from our speakers and other attendees. The continued prestige of the conference is in large part thanks to the generous financial support of the CU Boulder Center for Asian Studies, Cultural Events Board, and the Department of Asian Languages and Civilization. We will strive to maintain this high level of reputation for the CUBASGA annual conference, and will continue to facilitate graduate student research, cooperation and network building in the future.

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Event Friday - Things That Come and Go: Ephemera and Atmospherics in Times of Crisis

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 16:24:49 +0000

Event Friday - Things That Come and Go: Ephemera and Atmospherics in Times of Crisis Elizabeth Williams Mon, 04/14/2025 - 10:24

Friday, April 18 at 4pm
Hale 230

Professor Patricia Spyer will offer the Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology for the 2024-25 academic year. Her lecture will address the intersection of aesthetics, appearances, and the rise of public visual culture in Eastern Indonesia. Her recent book Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia, on Christian public art in Ambon, has been well received. Her new research, funded by a Swiss National Sciences Fund grant, expands that visual cultural research to other areas of Indonesia—Banda, Bali, Ternate, and Tidore. By expanding regionally, the project also emphasizes interconnection and circulation: of images, ideas, and commodities, as well as historical spans.

Notwithstanding the anthropological commitment to understanding everyday life in all its diversity, from banal to extraordinary circumstances, the discipline has tended to shy away from difficult to grasp if palpable phenomena like ambiance, climate, and atmospherics. Drawing on examples from her book, Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia (Fordham 2022), She will explore how fugitive forces and forms suffused and oriented the actions and experiences of wartime, from Karl von Klausewitz’s “fog of war” to huge Christian billboards and murals that sprung up in the Muslim-Christian conflict in Ambon, Indonesia in the early 2000s. Such elusive, ephemeral aspects of social life—from street art to invisible if palpable atmospherics deserve our acute attention. For even as they come and go, such phenomena can have a lasting impact. Depositing their traces in an assortment of practices and forms they bring about novel formations of sociality and the sensible, altered landscapes of living and cohabitation, and subtly different ways of seeing, dwelling, and engaging the world.

Patricia Spyer is a faculty member in Anthropology at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.

This event is funded in part by a grant by the Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

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Friday - Asia Symposium 2025: InterAsian Circulations

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:29:40 +0000

Friday - Asia Symposium 2025: InterAsian Circulations Elizabeth Williams Mon, 04/07/2025 - 09:29

Friday, April 11th
Center for British and Irish Studies, 5th floor
Norlin Library

11:30am-12:15pm Meet and Greet/Reception

12:15pm Introductions and Welcome

12:30-2pm Panel 1: Religious and Social Movements in Asia
In recent years, religious and social movements have been dynamic forces in Asian societies. This panel examines the contours of such movements and their politics, with attention to how they circulate within and beyond national borders.

2:15-3:45pm Panel 2: Migration and Refugee Circulations in Asia
Scholars and policy analysts have traditionally thought of migration as occurring from Asia to Europe, Australia/New Zealand, or the United States. Yet in 2020, out of 111 million migrants from Asia, more than 50 percent migrated to other countries within Asia. Migration is also increasingly occurring within Asian countries. This panel examines migration from the perspective of Asian societies.

4-5pm Keynote presentation:
Sea of Friends: Wilāya as a Moral Framework of InterAsian Circulation
Ismail Alatas, NYU

Find paper abstracts and speaker bios here.

This event is funded in part by a grant by the Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

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