Dr Benjamin Habib

Living Politics: Self-Help and Autonomous Action in East Asia and Beyond

Thank you to Prof Tessa Morris-Suzuki for inviting me to act as a discussant in the Living Politics: Self-Help and Autonomous Action in East Asia and Beyond, hosted by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific in Canberra, 14th-16th March 2018.  The following YouTube audio clip captures my remarks and the following Q&A, in which I identify three key themes which stood out for me across the conference:

  1. The global transition and the emergence of new “isms”;
  2. Living politics case studies as laboratories for emerging new modes of production, consumption, exchange, and social organisation and relation;
  3. The role of academics in this historic moment.

The conference is the culmination of the ARC Laureate Project Informal Life Politics in Northeast Asia: New Perspectives on Social Transitions from Cold War to Post Cold War, conducted by Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Dr Tom Cliff, Dr Shuge Wei, Dr Robert Winstanley-Chesters, Dr Uchralt Otede and Yonjae Paik.

This conference was about rethinking the boundaries of the “political,” exploring innovative autonomous ways in which people in East Asia and beyond are collaborating to solve challenges which conventional political systems fail to address.

Conference participants included practitioners in grassroots alternatives as well as academic researchers. Topics covered included informal life politics; re-imagining the state; cooperation and cooperatives; the self-help politics of memory, and art activism, with the aim of encouraging debate and inspiring new ways of looking at politics in the region.

Conference Participants

Thank you to my academic and practitioner colleagues for your wonderful presentations and stimulating discussion!

Charles Stafford_’Cooperation, kinship and the boundaries of the political’
Davina Cooper_’Playing as a state’
Fang I-Chieh_’Migrant workers, ghost stories and self help activities in a factory without a union’
Book Launch_Mongolian folk music
Kim Yu-ik_’Seeking inter-group empathy in a living community’
Lai Endian (with Wei Shuge)_’An independent documentary maker’s journey to record the lived experience of Sino-Japanese War veterans
Linh Nguyen_’Grassroots movements for LGBT rights in Vietnam’
Michal Glikson_’At the crossroads of art and applied anthropology’
Muto Ichio_’Residents autonomy as a means to overcome the Fukushima disaster’
Paik Yonjae_’Informal life politics in rural communities – The history of organic farming in Korea’
Conference Dinner
Robert Winstanley-Chesters (with Paik Yonjae)_’North Korean watery matters, living politics and their dispossessions’
Robert Winstanley-Chesters_’North Korean watery matters, living politics and their dispossessions’
Tanaka Natsuko_’Micro-scale self-help activities from below’
Uchralt Otede_’Community science in Inner Mongolia as a form of life politics’
Wei Shuge_’Self-organised social care for Nationalist veterans of the Sino-Japanese War’
Ben Habib pretending to deliver discussant remarks, after the fact