Today I received a very kind thank you letter from the Humanities Center for organizing the Made in China seminar. In the card, Rebecca pointed me to the comments that one of the participants, Hanna Erpestad, made on her blog about the seminar. I very much enjoyed reading the comments as well as some of the other interesting content on the site–In Global Context.
The two posts about the seminar are titled “Made in China” - Visible Globalization and Made in China: Mardi Gras. The latter link provides some excellent questions, discussion points and other resources that Ms. Erpestad wrote to accompany a documentary that we watched at the seminar–Mardi Gras: Made in China.
I think this clip illustrates quite nicely how a question about “China” is answered in a way that slides into the American category of “Asian” before it awkwardly lands in the category of “culture.” It is interesting the way that in the absence of specific knowledge about “China” the man in the clip relies on culture as an explanation–and then honestly admits he doesn’t really know exactly why. “Culture” seems like a “place holder” for all of the content that is missing.
What are the associations of “China”? I have some footage of responses to this question that were collected as part of a collaborative research project. The project was never completed and the footage has been sitting on my harddrive waiting to be shared. I am not sure about edublog’s space and bandwidth limitations, but I’m going to see if I can share a few of these.
I have been meaning to do this for some time now. It took a comment from a participant at a workshop I did last week at the Minnesota Humanities Center to finally push me to set up a blog. The workshop, titled Made in China: Economy, Environment, and Globalization, was organized for educators and it was a blast to teach. Anyway, one of the participants thought that a blog might be a useful way to share information related to my professional interest in China and the collection of associated concepts and relationships that “Made in China” brings together. So here it is. Let’s see how the experiment works out…
What if the “standard” map of the world wasn’t based on physical geography, but mapped according to toy imports, trade imbalances or some other criterion. Get ready to have your mind blown and check out
worldmapper.org
