Asia Beyond Borders: Transnational Activist Connections from Sun and Ho's Day to this Era of Lennon Walls and Three-Finger Salutes 

Speaker: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine 

Moderator: James Robson, James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Harvard College Professor; Director, Harvar-Yenching Institute 

In-person event. RSVP appreciated. 

Abstract: This presentation will look at some of the various ways that activists fighting for change in different parts of Asia have learned from and collaborated with one another during the last century and more. The presenter will draw on work he has done throughout a career that began with a dissertation on Shanghai student protests of the first half of the 1900s, included a ten-year stint as Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and has recently found him focusing on the ties between twenty-first-century youth movements in Hong Kong and Bangkok. One of his central arguments will be that for over a century repertoires of resistance in Asia have been flowing across not just the divisions between individual countries but also those that scholars often use to draw distinctions between multi-country regions within Asia. Another will be that even in this era of rapid global flows, even young activists versed in digital media who sometimes draw inspiration from things happening in and symbols associated with lands on the other side of the planet are often especially interested in and influenced by things taking place relatively nearby. 

Biography of the speaker: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who received a master's from Harvard's RSEA program in 1984 and a Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1989, is Chancellor's Professor of History at UC Irvine. The author of books such as Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020), he is currently finishing work on a short book about recent youth movements in East and Southeast Asia and connections between them.