Upcoming Public Events Presented or Co-sponsored by the USF Center for the Pacific Rim

Unless otherwise stated, all events are free and open to the public. RSVP recommended for all events; if they are required, notice is made in the individual event notice. If reservations are not required, no seat guarantee is implied by your RSVP.

To receive email and/or postal mail notification of our upcoming events, sign up here. To RSVP call (415) 422-6828. For for more information call (415) 422-6357.

Wednesday, 6 May, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
(Enter on Parker between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco)

Massive Monetary Meltdowns: Forging Answers for Failed Institutions
An interview with Barry Eichengreen, Ph.D., John L, Simpson Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley
(NOTE: The Massimo Franco event on Reagan and Pope John Paul II planned for this date has been replaced by this event.)

Professor Barry Eichengreen, a renowned political economist, is a prolific author having published fifteen books and coauthored nine others. He knows all there is to know about Other People's Money, the title of one co-authored work. His magisterial study, Globalizing Capital (2008), received rave reviews. Paul Volker, Formerly Chair of the Federal Reserve, wrote that the "book is a much needed and masterful survey of 150 years of international monetary history."

Questions for Eichengreen's visit here: Will the current global financial collapse match the destruction caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s? Will the safety nets created in western countries and Japan survive these bank & real estate failures or collapse under pressure? Will the two G2 superpowers, China and the United States, be able to contain the damage? Will international trade recover by late 2010? Will President Obama's first 100 days match those of FDR's. When it is all over, will the US economy resemble a European Social Democracy? Come here the educated possibilities.

Patrick L. Hatcher, Ph.D. Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Reservations recommended; call (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored by The USF Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought, the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning, and the Mechanics’ Institute.

Friday, 1 May 2009; 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM
PG&E Auditorium
77 Beale Street (between Market & Mission), San Francisco

Scaling Up : From Green Buildings to Green Cities in the US and China

For more information, visit the Asia Society website.

This one-day conference is the first to bring together leading green design specialists from the fields of research, technology, architecture, business, and policy from the US and China to build dialogue and collaboration. How are Bay Area and Chinese firms and individuals working together to create a green cities? How can we improve and scale up collaboration?

Presented by The Asia Society Northern California, Bay Area Council; cosponsored by the USF Center for the Pacific Rim.

Thursday, 30 April, 2009; 5:30 to 6:30 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall (Berman Room)
(Enter on Parker between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco)

Remaking the News Conference: “The News Environment in China and Hong Kong and the Role of Independent Media”
A presentation by Lam Oi Wan and Iam-chong Ip

Lam Oi Wan is an educator, editor and media activist in the field of new media. She teaches "Cyberpolitics" in the Chinese University of Hong Kong and works as Northeast Asia editor and coordinator for globalvoicesonline.org and global voices advocacy project (regarding internet censorship). She is a founding member and the present Chairperson of Hong Kong In-Media, an organization promoting independent media and free speech in Hong Kong, which also funds and supports inmediahk.net, a Chinese citizens’ media website, and interlocals.net, a cross border independent media platform (to be redesigned and relaunched in April 2009). Her professional journalism experience has included the coverage of the political news during the transition of Hong Kong from U.K to China from 1994-1997. She joined the Asian NGO (Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives) and coordinated the organization's alternative education program from 1997-2000, and later worked as managing editor for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal in Taiwan (2000-2002) before her M.Phil. study at Tsinghua University in Beijing (2002-2005).

Iam-chong Ip teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is one of the founders of the Hong Kong In-media (http://www.inmediahk.net). He is currently working on editing the Chinese Independent Media Report which covers the Chinese independent media development in mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

This event is presented by the Davies Forum and co-sponsored by the Center for the Pacifice Rim and the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
(Enter on Parker between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco)

China’s Combustion Conundrum: Economics and Energy vs Environment
A presentation by Mark Levine, Ph.D.; Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, China Energy Group and Co-founder, Beijing Energy Efficiency Center

Mark Levine earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at UC Berkeley. Before joining the Berkeley Lab, he was a Fulbright scholar in Germany, then a staff scientist at the Ford Foundation Project in Washington, D.C., followed by a stint as a senior energy policy analyst at SRI in Menlo Park. In recent years he has focused his research on China, particularly greenhouse gas emissions. His talk will cover three inter-related topics: the historical view of energy development in China, misconceptions about energy and environment in China, and issues relating to climate change negotiations between the United States and China.

Patrick L. Hatcher, Ph.D. Kiriyam,a Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Reservations recommended; call (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored by The Chinese Historical Society of America, the World Affairs Council of Northern California, USF’s Environrmental Science and Management Program, USF’s Environmental Studies Program, the Mechanics’ Institute, and the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Friday, March 13, 2009, 9:30 AM to 5:45 PM
Saturday, March 14, 2009, 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM
USF Main Campus, McLaren Complex, Room 250
(Golden Gate between Masonic & Parker in San Francisco)

Religion and Globalization in Asia: Prospects, Patterns, and Problems for the 21st Century

Few scholars or policy makers twenty years ago could have imagined that the first decades of the 21st century would be a time of explosive and wide-spread religiosity. As modernity progressed and societies became more secular and democratic, religion was supposed to loosen its hold on the ways men and women envisioned their place in the world. On the contrary, the dynamics of globalization?such as communication technologies, immigration and migration, capital flows, transnationalism, and identity politics?have contributed to social conditions in which religious belief and practice not only survive but prosper and proliferate. LEARN MORE

The objective of this conference is to muster the intellectual resources and research of experts in a variety of fields to better understand the prospects, patterns, and problems of religion and globalization in Asian societies in the near future.

RESERVATIONS MUST BE MADE BY MARCH 10; General Admission Fee (excluding lunch): $40. Students: $20. USF Faculty, students, and staff: Free. Please call (415) 422-6357 for more information.

Presented by The Kiriyama Chair for Pacific Rim Studies at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim. Sponsored by The Department of Theology and Religious Studies, The Asian Studies Degree Program, and The Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, at the University of San Francisco.

The USF Center for the Pacific Rim and Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies Mini-Festival at the



24 CITY
Saturday, 14 March | 3:30PM | PFA
Sunday, 15 March | 9:15PM | Kabuki

(China/Hong Kong/Japan, 2008, 107 mins) In Mandarin with English subtitles; DIRECTOR: Jia Zhang-ke

China's eminent filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns with an exquisite documentary/fiction hybrid that innovatively explores the still lives inhabiting Factory 420, a 50-year-old state-owned airplane munitions plant. The factory is a virtual city within the city of Chengdu, and is slowly being dismantled to give way to luxury apartment houses. Through interviews, both real and staged, its workers, many of whom have spent their entire lives within the confines of the factory's shops, schools and dormitories, narrate how its walls have come to embody China's modern history.

As the once-self-contained factory community is torn down, a collection of voices reveals the cycles of life that have sustained it over the decades. Fictionalized monologues are woven within real-life testimonies charting the factory's activities from the Korean War to the present day: stories of political engagement, love, regret and regeneration. In one fascinating sequence, actress Joan Chen plays Gu Minhua (a worker once fancied for her resemblance to Chen herself), and who is now living in the shadow of a love lost. Indeed, as Jia has commented, History is always a blend of fact and imagination. What emerges here is an elegy to a bygone city whose physical structures may be erased by the march of capitalist development, but whose memories live on.


PROJECT KASHMIR
Saturday, March 14 | 4:15PM | Kabuki
Sunday, March 15 | 3:30PM | PFA
Tuesday, March 17 | 4:15PM | Kabuki
Sunday, March 22 | 5:15PM | Camera

(USA | 2008 | 88 mins); In English, Hindi, Kashmiri & Urdu with English subtitles; DIRECTORS: Senain Kheshgi, Geeta Patel

In the scenic Kashmir Valley, saffron fields carpet the hilltops and shikaras glide along moonlit waters. A disputed territory between India and Pakistan for over 50 years, Kashmir was once called paradise on earth but is now scarred by extremist violence. This acclaimed documentary follows two American friends, Geeta and Senain, as they travel to Kashmir to discover the realities of daily life there, and why the bloodshed continues.

Shot by Academy-Award-winning filmmaker Ross Kauffman and edited by Billy McMillin, Project Kashmir follows the two friends as the breathtaking beauty of Kashmir gives way to constant reminders of conflict: paramilitary troops sporting AK-47s, trucks gutted by roadside bombs and abandoned homes crumbling into the earth. Geeta and Senain talk with villagers, journalists and human rights activists (though an informant warns them that double-speak is a way of life as well as a survival tactic). Unsure of whom to trust and what to believe, they find themselves on opposite sides of the divide, their bonds of friendship tested in a realm where one's identity is questioned at every turn.

Screened at DocuWeek and the 2008 International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, Project Kashmir portrays not only the tragedy of human conflict and suffering, but the power of courage and friendship, even in the face of war.


THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN
Sunday, March 15 | 4:30PM | Kabuki
Tuesday, March 17 | 9:15PM | Kabuki

(USA | 2009 | 75 mins); World Premiere; DIRECTOR: Brittany Huckabee

With its red-and-gold fall colors and ducks swimming in the river, Morgantown seems an unlikely battleground for the soul of Islam in America. But that's what happens when journalist Asra Nomani walks up to the door of a nondescript mosque in the West Virginia university town. Her demand that women be allowed to pray with the men, instead of being relegated to the backroom, ignites a national controversy. The Mosque in Morgantown goes behind the sensational rebel in the mosque headlines to present a nuanced, complex portrait of the real tensions in a community that since 9/11 finds itself under a harsh spotlight. Instead of becoming a bio-pic about Nomani's own personal jihad, what emerges is a remarkably intimate portrait of a community in turmoil. A woman worries Nomani is just a provocateur out to sell books; a blonde Islamic convert switches sides, and an earnest medical student tries to find middle ground between the factions. But the issue is larger than women in mosques. Nomani sees it as the struggle for Muslims to live in the 21st century while being defined by the seventh century. It's also about the profoundly lonely struggle of taking on one's own community.

On the day of Eid, which should be about communal celebration and mounds of fragrant biryani, Nomani watches the fragile crescent of the moon from a Chuck E. Cheese parking lot. It's an achingly telling moment in a compelling documentary about the wrenching price of change.


THE FORGOTTEN WOMEN
Monday, March 16 | 6:45PM | Kabuki
Wednesday, March 18 | 6:30PM | Kabuki
Thursday, March 19 | 6:30PM | PFA

(Canada/India | 2008 | 90 mins); In English, Bengali & Hindi with English subtitles; DIRECTOR: Dilip Mehta

Dilip Mehta's documentary The Forgotten Women begins where his older sister Deepa Mehta's Water ended. While that film created a fictional story about the marginalization of widows in India, complete with professional actors and glossy sets, The Forgotten Women turns instead to real stories, unvarnished settings and actual widows. No mere companion piece to WATER, this free-form portrait of real widows has more than enough visual beauty, graceful compassion and understated anger to stand on its own, as Nathan Lee of The New York Times wrote.

The Forgotten Women begins in the city of widows, the Indian holy city of Vrindavan, with striking images of widows living in poverty. An older woman tells us, I was gifted to my husband when I was 5. He died and I became a widow. One by one my family died?I'm still here?there's nobody left to light the lamp. An activist asks, "Why is it that widows continue to come to Vrindavan despite the empowerment, the emancipation of woman?"

Director Dilip Mehta was a production designer on Water, and was inspired by having heard many of the widow's heartbreaking stories there. Mehta's internationally acclaimed background as a photojournalist finds a true translation in film; he manages to capture beautiful, harsh moments that tell the story, yet remain respectful to the widows who bare their soul. For Susan Walker of Toronto Star, the film is a powerful reminder of the forgotten, while the HotDocs Film Festival writes, the stories and images raise a powerful call for change.

For tickets and more information visit: http://festival.asianamericanmedia.org. KABUKI = Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post St, San Francisco; CAMERA = Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 South Second Street, San Jose; PFA = Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley.

Monday, March 16, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall (Parker at Golden Gate in San Francisco)

Mosque in Morgantown: Islam and Feminism in West Virginia

After reporting from post-9/11 Pakistan, Indian Muslim Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani returns to the West Virginia town where she grew up to discover that the mosque there had been taken over by men she saw as extremists. The Mosque in Morgantown chronicles what happens when she decides to fight back - angering even the mosque?s moderates. As the film unfolds, it tells a story of competing paths to social change, American identity, and the nature of religion itself.

Join filmmaker Brittany Huckabee and Asra Nomani for clips of the film and a discusssion with the Center's Kiriyama Research Fellow Rachel Rinaldo, Ph.D., whose research on Islam and women?s activism in Indonesia provides a unique perspective on the film?s content.

The Mosque in Morgantown screens on Sunday, March 15, 4:30pm: Kabuki Theatres, SF (World Premiere); Tuesday, March 17, 9:15pm: Kabuki Theatres, SF; and Sunday, March 22, 5:15pm: Camera 12 Cinemas, San Jose, all as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call (415) 422-6828.

A joint presentation of the USF Center for the Pacific Rim and the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Visit the Festival website for more information. Co-sponsored by the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall (Parker at Golden Gate in San Francisco)

Hae-Nyo: Women of the Sea

In this one-hour film, a co-presentation by the Israeli and South Korean Consulates, we meet a community of South Korean island women who have lost their husbands to war, accidents, or desertion. Instead of giving up they bond and go down to the sea, not in ships, but in diving gear. There they free dive for a living, bringing back sea urchins, oysters, snails, and an occasional octopus or fish while also harvesting edible sea grasses. With this bounty they feed their families, young children and aging parents, selling the excess. They also farm plots on nearby fields to supplement their incomes. In her film Dahlia Gerstenhaber has captured these strong survivors who live on Cheju Island and dive into the ice-cold waters of the Korean Strait.

Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Ph.D., Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call (415) 422-6828.

A joint presentation of the USF Center for the Pacific Rim and the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Visit the Festival website for more information. Co-sponsored by the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Lone Mountain Campus, Room 100 (Turk Boulevard between Masonic & Parker, SF)

From Monuments to Masses: New Asian/American Film
An evening with Chi-hui Yang, Director of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

From the bustling streets of Kuala Lumpur to the quirks of suburban New Jersey, Asian and Asian American cinema reveals landscapes that are dynamic, interdependent and contradictory. Join Chi-hui Yang, Director of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) as he explores the changing terrain of Asian/American cinema, and the program for the upcoming SFIAAFF, which runs from March 12-22, 2009.

Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Ph.D., Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call (415) 422-6828.

A joint presentation of the USF Center for the Pacific Rim and the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Visit the Festival website for more information.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Lone Mountain Campus, Room 100 (Turk Boulevard between Masonic & Parker, SF)

Andrew X. Pham
In conversation with Gail Tsukiyama, author of The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, and Patrick Hatcher, Ph.D., Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim

The publication of Pham's first book, Catfish and Mandala, caused a sensation. The New York Times called it "remarkable," the Philadelphia Inquirer said it evokes "the full sadness of the human condition," and the Seattle Times compared this travel memoir to Thoreau, Kerouac, Steinbeck, and Mark Twain. Now Pham has expanded his horizon to chronicle three generations of his Vietnamese family as they struggle to survive three 20th century wars: French, Japanese, American. His new book, The Eaves of Heaven, has made Pham the leading voice among Vietnamese-Americans.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored byThe Asia Society Northern California, the World Affairs Council of Northern California, the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, the Mechanics' Institute, and the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Lone Mountain Campus, Room 100 (Turk Boulevard between Masonic & Parker, SF)

Economic Trends In 2009
A presentation by Nicholas C. Hope, Ph.D., Director, Stanford Center for International Development

Nicholas Hope uses his twenty-three years at the World Bank to translate economic data in today's trends that will create tomorrow's reality. Will China and India be the economic engines that revive world trade? Will economic reforms from Washington cure Wall Street's failures, or corporate America's misfortunes? Dr. Hope has hope.

Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Ph.D., a Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored by the Asia Society Northern California, the USF School of Business and Management, the USF Department of Economics, the Mechanics' Institute, and the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall (Parker at Golden Gate in San Francisco)

Economic Earthquakes 2: A conversation with Hon. Bon-Woo Koo, Consul General of South Korea

South Korea is a trading tiger whose giant corporations reach around the Pacific Rim where they generate jobs and capital. With new leaders in Tokyo and Washington, and possible upheavals in Pyongyang, what are likely policy options?

Bon-Woo Koo graduated from Seoul National University and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1980.

Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Ph.D., a Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call our event registration line at (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored by the Asia Society Northern California, the Japan Society of Northern California, the Intercultural Institute of California, and the World Affairs Council of Northern California. Funded by the Kiriyama Chair for Pacific Rim Studies at USF.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 5:45 PM
USF Lone Mountain Campus, Room 100
Turk @ Chabot, San Francisco

Economic Earthquakes 1: A conversation with Hon. Yasumasa Nagamine, Consul General of Japan

Japan is the world's second largest economy, and how this Pacific powerhouse reacts to the current economic crisis will impact global markets. With new leaders in Tokyo and Washington, and possible upheavals in Pyongyang, what are likely policy options?

Yasumasa Nagamine graduated from Tokyo University and joined Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1977.

Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Ph.D., a Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC; reservations recommended. Please call our event registration line at (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored by the Asia Society Northern California, the Japan Society of Northern California, the Intercultural Institute of California, and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.