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Essays by GCOE Members

From a Corner of Hong Kong, a Global City

- Tomohisa Hirata, GOE Researcher

 I’ve been walking from Internet cafe to Internet cafe, doing interview surveys in East Asia and Southeast Asia since August 2008. I do this because the Net cafes in each of the Asian countries are places providing inexpensive access to PCs and the Internet, and they give one a close look at the youth culture of each country. They also serve as a mirror reflecting the reality of the poverty of the region.

 Hong Kong’s Kowloon district is an example of what I’m talking about. Since the region was returned to China, it has continued to enjoy a high level of autonomy. This plus the fact that people from countries all over the world, people of all races, come here seeking work make Hong Kong a global city. Here in a corner of the city, a Hong Kong resident, who says his grandparents emigrated here from Pakistan, manages an Internet cafe that occupies a space in a dark building housing many types of businesses. Most of his customers are married women who have come here from their home country to work. These women use the PCs to communicate via Skype with the husbands and children back home. Some use Web cameras to exchange moving pictures with their family members to help verify how everyone is doing. This is an excellent means of maintaining contacts since it costs much less than an international phone call would.

 Unlike the case in Japan, Internet cafes in this part of the world do not offer private, individual booths, but the problem of privacy seems to vanish in the air in this Hong Kong shop. Each customer faces her monitor and the families gather on the screens like they are in the middle of a park. When I was there around the beginning of January, I looked out of the corner of my eye to see a woman teaching her child to sing “We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” and to play it on the recorder. It makes one wonder what the infrastructure known as the Internet is really supposed to be.

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The 2nd Next-Generation Global Workshop (2009)

The 2nd Next-Generation Global Workshop, Nov. 21-22, 2009

APPLICATION GUIDELINE for Applicants from Overseas Partner Institutions

 

The 2ND Next-Generation Global Workshop
Is “Family” Alive? :Changing Social Relations through Sex, Politics and Communication

 

Overview of Next-Generation Global Workshop
The purpose of the Next-Generation Global Workshop is to provide early career scholars an opportunity to give presentations, to exchange opinions with their peers from various parts of the world, and to learn how to organize an international academic workshop. We plan to hold such workshops for five years, and this is the second year. Following the last year, it will be held again in Kyoto University, Japan.
This year, we aim to focus on Family as the main theme as it is a contested notion in recent social and human sciences; some specialists say that Family is now so diverse that it no longer stands as an analytical concept whilst it is still used unquestioned in our daily life from social welfare policies to neighborhood conversations, perhaps without contemplation on changes happening in actual families. This gap between the concept and the practice of Family can be a worthwhile topic of the workshop as it seems to overlap with the concern of GCOE Program: reconstruction of intimate and public spheres.
How does Family respond to the expectations of our society, does it function, what does it entail, if at all? More boldly, the question is ‘Is Family alive’? We propose to discuss this big issue by looking into discourse, media, welfare, migration, sexuality and gender centered around Family, dividing the two day workshop into four sessions.
Apply with care that this way of organization is different from last year’s, and your presentation needs to fit into one of the four session categories: Gender, Sexuality and Family; Welfare and Family; Migration and Family; Discourse, Media and Family. We look forward to seeing your high-quality applications.