State and Society in East Asia

Public space will be the course’s main theme for 2024-2025. Considering its multiple forms (e.g., physical or online), we will approach public space as a site for interaction, and blurring of boundaries, between “state” and “society” in the late socialist countries of Northeast and Southeast Asia, notably China, Vietnam, and Laos. Topics such as public gatherings, propaganda, memory, online activism, public secrecy or intimacy will be explored through in-person talks by different scholars, including Vanessa Frangville, Carwyn Morris, Van Minh Nguyen, Pierre Petit, Olivier Tappe, and Isabelle Thireau (list to be expanded).

Students will acquire epistemological and theoretical tools to analyze practices unfolding in, and constitutive of public spaces, as a site of interaction between state and society in the authoritarian political contexts of the late socialist countries under scrutiny. The course will foreground the complexity of sociospatial dynamics as observed in the field, which exemplify processual conceptions of publicness and public spaces, while complicating a clear-cut understanding of “state” and “society” as discrete entities.

Overall, students will acquire knowledge of the historical and social diversity of the different areas of Northeast and Southeast Asia.

The instructor will provide a state of the art during the first lesson. The course will then function as a research seminar, based on guest lectures in which different speakers’ present aspects of their research in the making, before opening for questions and answers. Both delivered by the instructor, a mid-term and concluding lecture will help “tie up” the various threads running across the talks, thus illuminating significant aspects of ever-shifting state-society relations in its spatialized dimensions.

Contacts

Lisa.Richaud-Berthoumieu@ulb.be

Campus

Solbosch

Méthode(s) d'évaluation

• Travail personnel
• Examen écrit

Travail personnel

Examen écrit

The written exam will consist of 2 or 3 questions for which the students should be able to provide syntheses of the different conferences and argue on transversal issues addressed in them. Mandatory readings on the topic will be assigned by early March and it will be expected that students mobilize them in their answers. Presence is mandatory. Absence must be justified and medical attestation provided in the three days following the course, if applicable.

Construction de la note (en ce compris, la pondération des notes partielles)

Presence and participation: 4 points. More than three unjustified absences will automatically lead to failure for the whole course.
Personal work: 4 points.
Written exam: 12 points.
 

Langue(s) d'évaluation

• anglais
• (éventuellement français )