The Official EASC Podcast A compendium of interdisciplinary conversations produced by the foremost experts of East Asian Studies in Indiana based on thematic research interests with scholars and specialists to enhance our global understanding competencies.
The East Asian Studies Center in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies is proud to introduce its new Official EASC Podcast. With each episode, join us on a journey through the minds of experts linking East Asian research and cultural interests with internationally relevant topics that build on a network of knowledge, practice, resources, and discovery to improve our global fluency.
Whether you’re an aspiring politician, an artist, an environmental advocate, a humanitarian, an academic, or an entrepreneur, this podcast is your starting place to make a connection with East Asian resources.
The East Asian Studies Center is composed of nearly 200 members including faculty from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, faculty from other IU Departments and Schools with substantial teaching and research interest in East Asia, and faculty or other scholars and professionals from institutions in the central Midwest region with regular teaching or research interests in East Asia.
While as colleagues or students we often have the opportunity to experience the courses, guidance, and administrative endeavors of IU’s faculty, it is sometimes surprising that we don’t always know what drives our faculty—about what are they passionate? What nugget of knowledge or niggling question started them on the path towards their research interests?
Hence our Faculty Insights series: who are our faculty? What research do they pursue outside the gen ed classroom? How does their research relate to the global environment today? And what can we learn from them about or apply to our own interests and endeavors?
In collaboration with the Hamilton Lugar School’s Area Studies Centers, the East Asian Studies Center has launched into a a multi-faceted exploration of the history of collective violence. In East Asia, as everywhere, violence (or the threat thereof) has determined the fates of nations, driven advancements in technology and administration, and spurred doctrinal developments in philosophy and religion.
This series facilitates dialogue between scholars from different disciplines about how violence can be understood. With both global and historical approaches, our network of experts is ideally situated to explore how different social contexts inform sentiments and appropriate and/or illegitimate violence—an approach that is critical for developing sustainable and effective policies for violence prevention in the future.
Over the past decade, interest in fermentation has boomed in the US, and it is by many observers regarded as one of the areas in the food sector with the highest growth potential while simultaneously being one of the most revolutionary fields in health and medical sciences. Fermentation studies are thus situated at a vibrant and rapidly developing frontier, and the East Asian Studies Center intends to bring the humanities into a debate otherwise dominated by the natural sciences.
Through historical and sociological conversations of East Asian food cultures, we seek new insights into the complexities between society and nutrition, environment and microbiomes, human cultures and bacterial cultures—all through the lens of traditional East Asian practices of food fermentation and consumption.
In traditional textbooks, we rarely hear about the history, languages, and cultures of the many indigenous people and other ethnic minorities who live or have lived in East Asia. From the Ainu in Northern Japan to the Seediq in the highlands of Taiwan and the large Uyghur and Tibetan minorities in China and many others, ethnic minorities and indigenous people have striven to protect their rich heritages and linguistic characteristics against colonial powers, expanding nation-states, as well as the homogenizing forces of globalization.
Building on our speaker series "Indigenous East Asia" in Fall 2021, EAC aims to amplify the voices of these peoples and recenter them on the map of East Asian civilizations, featuring scholars from various fields of linguistics, anthropology, history, and social science.
