We are delighted to announce the winner of the Center for Taiwan Studies Audio Interview Award for Winter 2022: Lauren Lee, a UCSB undergraduate student. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to CTS’s research project, Made in Taiwan—examples of interviews conducted by UCSB students of individuals who grew up in Taiwan.
Please check out Lauren’s interview of Vicky on the CTS Youtube channel here. The next CTS Audio Interview Award will be given in May 2022. For more details, visit website.
To encourage international students and individuals to undertake Mandarin Chinese language study in Taiwan, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Republic of China (Taiwan) established the MINISTRY OF EDUCATION HUAYU ENRICHMENT SCHOLARSHIP (HES) Program. The application period is February 1 – March 1, 2022.
In addition to the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship (HES) and starting this year, the Ministry of Education launched the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program (TFETP) to expand the recruitment of English teachers and teaching assistants. Please see the links below for more information on both of these wonderful opportunities:
Ring in the Year of the Tiger by celebrating Lantern Festival with us this Friday, February 18, 3-5pm in the HSSB Courtyard! There will be snacks, games, and trivia. All are welcome!
Keita C. Moore, one of EALCS’s many talented graduate students, has published a review of an important work in global gaming studies, Open World Empire by Christopher B. Patterson, in the Journal of Asian Studies, the premier journal in our field. Click here to read his review. Congratulations, Keita!
Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world’s largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy — but whose work remains stigmatized and dangerous. This talk reframes the labor of adult Japanese women working in Tokyo’s legal sex industry as female care work. Sex as care, I argue, reflects the simultaneous importance and marginality of female sex workers in Japan as well as the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves.
Gabriele Koch is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies care and its contestations in contemporary Japan. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College and author of Healing Labor: Sex Work in the Gendered Economy (Stanford University Press, 2020). Her work has also appeared in American Ethnologist and Critical Asian Studies, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Anthropology. Her current research focuses on the recent re-imagination of Japanese forests as agents of human well-being.
