Meaghan Morris in Cultural Studies in Asia

Meaghan has been part of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project from the very beginning— she was at the founding conferences, organised by Chen Kuan-Hsing, in National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, between 1992 and 1995. The two conferences bore the title of ‘Trajectories: Towards a New Internationalist Cultural Studies’ and ‘Trajectories II: A New Internationalist Cultural Studies’, respectively. According to Kuan-Hsing, he was motivated by historical changes in Asia, from postwar decolonisation to post-Cold War in late 1980s, marked locally in Taiwan with the lifting of martial law in 1987. This was also the period of the rise of Asia within global capitalism, beginning with Japan, followed by the so-called ‘Tiger’ or ‘Dragon’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore via the export-oriented industrialisation. The industrialisation model was subsequently picked up by China and the other Southeast Asian countries. The conferences certainly lived up to their promise of being international, with presenters from first and third world locations, and the core concerns were very much grounded in the historical conjuncture of Asia at the end of the twentieth century. One evening during the second conference, while the edited volume for selected papers were being prepared for publication, Rebecca Barton, the editor for the book project at Routledge, brought up the idea of an Asian cultural studies journal. In a hotel room in Taiwan, with Meaghan, the late Jeannie Martin, Kuan-Hsing and myself from the conference and Rebecca, the plan for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies was hatched. It was decided that Kuan-hsing and I would be the co-executive editors, supported by a relatively large editorial collective drawn across Asia and Australia

Life is beautiful: gay representation, moral panics, and South Korean television drama beyond Hallyu

Critical attention on Korean popular culture, particularly outside of Korea, has focused upon the Hallyu cultural phenomenon at the expense of sectors of the Korean creative industries that have sought to actively engage with their social and cultural environment and challenge the status quo. Politically charged, countercultural or just distinctive and/or original, non-Hallyu cultural artifacts have been and continue to be born out of a desire to be creative, to comment on or to create social change. This article focuses upon one such critically overlooked South Korean cultural artifact, the audacious and genuinely groundbreaking television drama "Life is Beautiful" (SBS 2010), which motivated an immense amount of critical and social reaction within Korea and yet has barely featured in English language analysis of Korean drama because it has not been classified as Hallyu. This is in spite of it being a finely produced and performed series and one written by the most prolific, longest serving and commercially successful of all Korean writers of Hallyu drama, Kim Soo-hyeon. In addition to its impressive production credentials, "Life is Beautiful" is also notable for being hugely controversial at the time of its broadcast due to its boldness in tackling the subject of Korean prejudice towards homosexuality

On possible transformation of everyday life in North Korea via referencing other East Asian socialist nations in transition

10.1080/14649373.2020.1796349Inter-Asia Cultural Studies213432-43

Reflections on Inter-Asia as method

In an interesting coincidence, at the first Inter-Asia Connection conference held in Dubai in 2010, I proposed a workshop on \u27Singapore as model\u27, i.e. Singapore as reference for many developing nations, while Aihwa Ong proposed one on \u27Inter-referencing Asia\u27 in examining how Asian cities are borrowing from each other in urban planning and developments. While the selected papers from Ong\u27s workshop, including mine, were in preparation, Chen Kuan Hsing published his Asia as Method. All these efforts can be distilled into the idea of \u27inter-referencing\u27 Asia. The idea that of referencing relaxes the process of comparison which enables one to introduce the methodological terms used in Cultural Studies, such as resonance and provocation. In this seminar, I will discuss the use of \u27inter-referencing Asia\u27 as a method and as a substantive practice among Asian nations

Multiculturalism in Island South-East Asian

"As postcolonial nations, the boundaries of countries in island Southeast Asia were determined and delineated by the respective colonial administrations prior to political independence. Consequently, the territorial boundaries approximately correspond with the territorial limits under colonial tutelage. Within these territories are to be found indigenous colonized population and resident immigrant populations encouraged by the economic opportunities provided by colonization. As postcolonial nations, these countries are unavoidably 'multiracial' or 'multiethnic', and thus 'multicultural', by their colonial legacies. Each of these countries has transformed this demographic and geographic reality into part of the national ideology and political practice, in respective ways that are historically over determined. This paper will attempt to place these three cases within a larger theoretical framework of multiculturalism and call for political adjustments in the three polities.

State-owned enterprises, state-capitalism and social distribution in Singapore

10.1080/09512748.2015.1022587The Pacific Review294499-52

Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore

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DESIGN OF A MULTI DSP SYSTEM FOR IMAGE PROCESSING

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN