UW-TSP will offer three courses for Spring Quarter 2022! Two of the three offerings, Made in Taiwan and Taiwan Indigenous Cultures, are being offered for the first time. Please consider these courses as you plan for your upcoming quarter.

Made in Taiwan: Arts and Culture of Contemporary Taiwan

Instructor: Ellen Chang

JSIS 484 B / CMS 320A

This course will provide an introduction to the arts and culture of contemporary Taiwan through audio/visual texts of several key themes. Our travels over the quarter will explore a curated series of audio/visual works that embodies the multi-faceted narratives of “Made in Taiwan” as they capture the complexity and multiplicity of Taiwan’s artistic and cultural scenes both within and beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the island, as well as the tensions and debates that emerge at moments of cross-cultural interactions. Our audio/visual sites of inquiry range from documentary and narrative films, independent and major labels music, folksongs, recordings of live performance, video art and installation, photo- and video-essays, television series, animations, video games, and vlogs, some of which were made with a distinct local or international audience in mind while others embrace both.

“Made in Taiwan” will address topics such as the role of gender as it intersects with other social formations, indigeneity of Taiwan, indigenous land rights and environmental protests, how migrant workers and transnational marriage confront racial constructs and multiculturalism of Taiwan, sport as vehicles for navigating national identity, collective trauma and cultural memories, cultural productions as soft power to negotiate global politics, and how local folk culture—cuisines, rituals, lifestyles—becomes spectacles for local and international tourism, urban regeneration, and community mobilization.

By the end of the course, students should have a good idea of what Taiwan is, how it looks, sounds, and feels like, and be able to discuss cultural products and issues about Taiwan in relation to local and global perspectives and interactions.

Taiwan Indigenous Cultures 

Instructor: Jiun-Yu Liu

JSIS 484E / ANTH 469A

Date and Time: Tues/Thurs, 10:30-12:20pm

Credits: 5

Taiwan is a society that composes of two major ethnical groups: Han Chinese and Austronesian Indigenous peoples. Although the population of Taiwanese Indigenous people is less than ten percent of the total population in Taiwan, Indigenous people have thrived on the island for thousands of years. The flourishing Taiwan Indigenous cultures have faced challenges from external colonial powers since the seventeenth century to modern days and once endangered. However, over the last two decades, the cultural revitalization movements have shown positive results. The bottom-up and top-down works of the tribes, academia, and government show the efforts of the revitalization movements, and Taiwan is now one of the centers preserving and studying Austronesian culture. In this course, we will explore various themes like peopling of Taiwan, formation of cultures, interaction between peoples, and contemporary issues and social movements of Indigenous Taiwanese.

Who are Taiwanese, becoming Taiwanese, and forming Taiwan Identity are hot academic topics in Taiwan studies in recent decades. And we are going to approach these topics from the Taiwan Austronesian perspective. While anthropological and archeological studies and observations will be the primary reading material for this course, students are not required to have related backgrounds. This course is designed for all the attendees to co-develop and learn from each other. After this course, you should have more understanding about Austronesian Indigenous Taiwanese, who are the essential component of Taiwan society. And you should have good ideas to discuss issues related to Taiwan and Taiwanese Indigenous from emic and etic perspectives.

Asian Financial Systems

Instructor: Marie Anchordoguy

JSIS A 553/ JSIS 484 A

Date and Time: Tues, 2:30-5:20

Credits: 5

This interdisciplinary seminar will look at how Asian financial systems and business systems worked in the past and work today, and how institutional arrangements such as industrial groups and industrial policies worked together with the financial systems in what might be called Asian variants of capitalism. We will focus primarily on China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

In contrast to Western Nations, Asian nations developed much later and needed different capitalist institutions to catch-up and create advanced economies. Thus, all the Asian nations that have successfully caught up with the West developed state-guided, bank-based financial systems. Their stock markets developed later, after they became relatively strong economies. “Late developer” nations prefer banks for several reasons: they do not have enough rich people to finance corporations through a stock market so they need the government to back banks, which gather many small deposits from citizens; citizens are more likely to trust banks, which are regulated or owned by the government, than unknown capitalists trying to sell stocks or bonds in individual firms that could go bankrupt; corporations depending on bank loans can make more stable, predictable, investments over the long run than getting financing through the stock market, where prices, demand, and supply can fluctuate wildly; and governments, through their Ministries of Finance and Central Banks can influence banks and thereby guide development in the early decades of catch-up. That is, the government can help make sure that most of the nation’s scarce resources are invested in industries deemed critical for developing a sophisticated, high-wage economy, not in wasteful luxury industries or in state officials’ back pockets. Governments can also help protect citizens’ savings deposits.

There will be a guest speaker or two and all the classes will involve in-depth discussion of articles and books; it is not a lecture course. There is a lot of reading in this seminar. Some graduate students and advanced undergraduates, with the professor’s approval, may write long research papers on topics related to this course. Otherwise, undergraduates and graduate students will have an in-class midterm exam and a take-home exam covering the readings and discussions.