The speaker says that restoration of Cheonggye stream in downtown Seoul is arguably the most prestigious and controversial construction project in Korea today. Since its reopening in 2005 after having been buried for half a century, the stream site has become an important leisure place for the urban populace. It has also become an icon of greener Seoul in it’s quest for a global city status. In the meantime, the stream project also actively mobilized the discourses of national identity restoration, heritage and "people."  This talk is about the ideology and the representation of Cheonggye stream. It will focus on how the stream project seeks to revive a sense of the shared past as a galvanizing force in what is after all divisive transformations in the new urban economy of contemporary Korea. The speaker aims to show how the stream restoration represents an important shift in the mode of governing the urban population.

Dr. Hong Kal is Associate Professor of Art History at the department of Visual Arts, York University.  Her research explores the politics of a visual spectacle in twentieth-century Korea.  She is the author of Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism (Routledge, forthcoming).  She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center in 2003-2005.

Patricia Isasa, a successful architect in Argentina, is a survivor of torture and imprisonment from the age of 16 to 18 during the Argentine dictatorship. She was imprisoned in 1976.  Twenty years later she almost single handedly investigated the identities of 8 perpetrators of the crimes against her and others.  Because of an impunity law in Argentina at the time, she took her case to Judge Baltasar Garzon in Spain who requested extradition, which was denied. In 2009 her case was finally tried in Argentina.

Six perpetrators were found guilty of human rights violations.  Her trial is one of the first trials of the Argentine military and police. Patricia is now helping others with their cases and is working with President Cristina Kirchner to investigate the takeover of Papel Prensa in the 70s by the then and present media giant Clarin, which has resulted in extensive corporate control of the media in Argentina.

Sponsored by

Program on Human Rights, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,

Center for Latin American Studies,

and Arroyo House 

Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.

Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panelists:

Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.

Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.

Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell." So opens Mao's Great Famine: A History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, Frank Dikötter's riveting and magnificently detailed chronicle of the Great Leap Forward. Using previously restricted archives, historian Dikötter reveals that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. Piecing together both the vicious machinations in the corridors of power and the everyday experiences of ordinary people, Dikötter at last gives voice to the dead and disenfranchised.

Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published nine books on  modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China(1992) to China before Mao: The Age of Openness (2007). 

**Books will be available for purchase during this event.**