Join us for our next Critical Research on Africa talk:

"In Situ Marginalization: The Urban Wetland-Livelihood (Dis)assemblage in Coastal Ghana"
by Seth Asare Okyere, Urban Studies Teaching Assistant Professor

Thursday, April 16
1:00 to 2:30 PM
5603 Posvar Hall & Zoom

Attend the "Pre-Colonial African Traditions: An Exploration of African Indigenous Knowledge" lecture on precolonial African cultures by Dr. Eric Kwadwo Beeko from the Department of Africana Studies. This lecture is open to students, faculty, and staff. Refreshments will be served.

Both the United States and Germany have a long history of residential care for children, but in the last fifty years have taken different directions on policy and practice.
This lunch and learn will include global information, but will focus on how the workforce in both countries are prepared for children who require out-of-home care.

About the Speakers:

Mary Rauktis, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh

European Studies Center Brown Bag Lunch and Learn Series

In 2022, the Meloni government renewed plans to connect Sicily and the Italian mainland— plans that had lain dormant for more than a decade—and build the largest single-span suspension bridge in the world. What does this most recent chapter of the bridge’s story tell us about Sicily’s place in the Italian nation, in Europe, and in frameworks of integration
and security? And how do the politics of this moment resonate with earlier plans to bind this notoriously “seismic” island to more “stable” ground?

European Studies Center Brown Bag Lunch and Learn Series

Sören Urbansky, Ruhr University Bochum Chair, Eastern European History

Dr. Urbansky discusses the challenges faced by Chinese immigrants during the late Tsarist Empire and early Soviet Union, highlighting the racial and cultural prejudices that fueled hostilities in urban settings. His analysis explores how these early interactions shaped the experiences and perceptions of Chinese communities in a rapidly changing socio-political landscape.

Have a sit down discussion with Senior Researcher Natalie Mamonova

Dr. Zhong's work explores how, subject to the forces of the state and the market, Chinese cultural production continues to be influenced by different and sometimes conflicting cultural and ideological legacies related to the complexity of one and a half centuries of modern Chinese history. Television drama as a quintessential mainstream cultural phenomenon and offers a diverse collectionof televisual textual materials with which to study the implications of these influences. 

This article is part of an ongoing ethnography of the Japanese television industry focusing on its attempts to experiment with live, interactive content that was manipulable via smart devices, laptops, and remote controls. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in the Japanese television industry in four major TV network offices and two production companies, it also incorporates interviews with more than 30 broadcast company employees.

Squid Game’s phenomenal success calls attention to the local specificity of Netflix’s global expansion as it commissions original K-dramas. This practice has rich implications, both positive and negative, for Netflix’s production and distribution of Korean content. K-dramas classified as Netflix Originals have been riding its international market power to a wide range of transnational audiences, enabling national television creators to reimagine cultural spheres for both production and distribution that transgress the uneven circuit of transnational media.