Previous Events

Monday, 29 May 2023, 4:00-5:30PM

The use of language in public space is an important indicator of identity, which shows how languages are valued in a given community in both practical and symbolic manners. In this workshop, we will explore how identity is visually manifested in the physical and digital landscapes through the examination of the language of public signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, and so on.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 3:00 - 4:00 pm (JST)

This talk deals with two interrelated phenomena in Japanese writing practices: (1) the integration of loanwords and (2) the romanization of Japanese vocabulary. I will argue that the two phenomena are in fact complementary, resulting in a high degree of hybridity between what is native and what is foreign.

Thursday, 25 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

International human rights law guarantees a ‘right to participate in and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications’. The lecture will explain why the so-called ‘right to science’ has largely stayed inactive, and what its recently-rekindled participatory dimension implies for its right-holders and duty-bearers. It proposes to interpret the right to science as a public good to help revise the predominant approach to science as an individual, ahistorical and acultural enterprise, and reverse the trend towards its privatization and commodification.

Monday, 22 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

Professor Andrew Gordon is studying the public history of industrial heritage, beginning with the UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Sites of Japan’s industrial revolution. He is also interested in sites of industrial heritage which have not been (and probably will not be) nominated to UNESCO. His talk will focus on two such sites. One is old and famous: the Ashio Copper Mine and Refinery. Another is Japan’s newest “industrial heritage site”: the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Monday, 15 May 2023, 5:00-6:30 pm

The European Union is about to implement the world’s first carbon border adjustment mechanism: a charge on imports from countries with lower carbon prices. Advocates see this as a major advance in the fight against climate change. Opponents see it as opening the door to protectionism. What are the arguments and evidence? Should other countries do the same?

Tuesday, 25 April 2023 4:00-5:30 pm

Increases in computer power and computational tools have transformed economic research, as well as many other sciences. This talk will discuss the ways that growing computer power has changed economics and finance, and how recent developments such as deep learning, artificial intelligence and machine learning might transform it in the future.

Saturday, 22 April 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm (Doors open: 3:30 pm)

During the last 122 years, almost 1000 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Laureates and their great achievements are a tremendous source of inspiration, including for cancer research aiming at understanding why and how we get cancer, and how it can be treated, which is the theme of the presentation.

Wednesday, 19 April 2023, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm JST

Is our language inundated by loanwords? Or is it being enriched by absorbing foreign vocabulary? We often hear such discussions in contemporary Japan. Loanwords and Japanese Identity: Inundating or Absorbed? explores the relationship between language and identity through an examination of public attitudes towards lexical borrowing in the Japanese language.

Monday, 17 April 2023, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm (JST)

The embedded notion of the inseparable relationship between the nation, the language, and the people has shaped Japan’s language policy. In this talk, Dr.Kayoko Hashimoto (The University of Queensland) discusses how learners’ identity has been constructed in so-called “English education” in Japan and how learners’ identity has been assumed in the promotion of Japanese language teaching overseas.

Monday, 17 April 2023, 2:30-4:00 PM

In this workshop, we will discuss how the question of identity is reflected in education and language policy, through the process of standardization of the national language, as well as the teaching and treatment of the foreign, national, regional languages.

Tuesday, 4 April 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

What is the relationship of humans to animals and to mountains in Japanese culture? To natural disasters? How can these complex relationships help us generate an environmental ethics relevant to the present? Shirane proposes an “ecology of disaster, afterlives, and rebirth” as a means to rethink the relationship of the human to the non-human.

Friday, 31 March 2023, 10:00-11:30 am

In honor of International Women’s Day, Tokyo College’s “Gender, Sexuality & Identity” collaborative research group will host a panel that will explore the role of translation in practices of transnational feminist solidarity. Panelists will discuss the recent protests in Iran for “Woman, Life, Freedom” as a case study for contemplating how women led movements may be translated into different contexts to facilitate multi-directional relationships of learning and solidarity.

Friday, 10 March 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

Prof. Björkegren’s research focuses on the helical nature of DNA. The lecture will give a background to this analysis, presenting the structure and function of chromosomal DNA and how these features influence cellular growth. This will set the stage for a final discussion on how and if the organization of the hereditary material into a double stranded helix shapes the identity and development of our cells.

Wednesday, 8 March 2023, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm JST

Challenges that both concern and span the globe, such as those indicated by the SDGs, are drawing increasing attention, and the problems resulting from pandemics and economic turmoil have grown more significant. Many of these challenges become apparent as they come in contact with issues at the local and regional level. Rather than attempting to solve individual challenges, however, more fundamental, forward-thinking social transformations are required. In this discussion forum, we explore what social responsibilities universities should fulfill in these circumstances with a special focus on the impact on knowledge production. The forum will also summarize the contents of “The Future of Higher Education” dialogue series held by Tokyo College over seven sessions from December 2022 to March 2023.

Wednesday, 1 March 2023, 15:00-16:00

In this presentation, Dr. HIRAMOTO Mie explores the changing ideas of masculinity in Asia and beyond through the lens of sociolinguistics. She focuses on the relationships between sociocultural stereotypes and masculinity ideologies, as well as the ways in which genre, style, and medium shape our understanding of these concepts. Drawing mainly on Agha’s works, the theoretical concepts of mediatization and enregisterment, as well as figures of personhood, will be employed in the analysis of three case studies.

Wednesday, 1 March 2023, 16:00-17:30

In this workshop, we discuss the role of media in manifesting, representing, and reifying identities, and what role language plays in this relationship. We explore the role of genre, imagined audience, and media creator in language use, and what implications media consumption has for our own perceptions of identity and belonging.

Wednesday, 1 March 2023, 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Higher education around the world is experiencing vast changes in its multiple environments as a result of numerous factors, including globalization, shifts in the boundary conditions of truth, the effects of technology, geopolitical uncertainties, and calls for ‘decolonisation’. This seminar series explores the impact of these factors on the future of higher education.

Monday, 27 February 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

The general public is more familiar with Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley, who imagined Frankenstein as a monstrous metaphor of modernity. Historians are also aware that Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary Shelley.
However, among scholars, the two texts of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men as a response to Edmund Burke and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, are of foremost importance. In this lecture, Prof. Serna will introduce another less-known and long-depreciated text titled An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution; and the Effect it Has Produced in Europe. He intends to show that it is one of the first great histories of the French Revolution, proposing a new narrative and a new historiographic epistemology.

Monday, 20 February 2023, 4:00-5:30 PM

A number of humanoid robots in Japan have been supplied with gender and emotions, qualities that are stereotyped and greatly simplified in order to create algorithms. Artificial intelligence (AI), which is comprised of numerous algorithms, is useful for tasks that rely on pattern recognition, but AI can also perpetuate and reproduce the everyday social biases of their human designers. In this presentation, Prof. Jennifer Robertson discusses these robots and the implications that their design has for other industries, including surveillance.

Wednesday, 15 February 2023, 3:00-4:00 pm

Higher education around the world is experiencing vast changes in its multiple environments as a result of numerous factors, including globalization, shifts in the boundary conditions of truth, the effects of technology, geopolitical uncertainties, and calls for ‘decolonisation’. This seminar series explores the impact of these factors on the future of higher education.

Wednesday, 8 February 2023, 4:00-5:30pm

Professor Craig Jeffrey and Associate Professor Jane Dyson will show how young people in rural Uttarakhand, north India, attempt to make viable lives as they respond to environmental and socio-economic crises and engage in everyday social action. They will also screen Professor Dyson’s documentary film Spirit, which explores related themes.

Wednesday, 8 February 2023, 10:00-11:00 am

Higher education around the world is experiencing vast changes in its multiple environments as a result of numerous factors, including globalization, shifts in the boundary conditions of truth, the effects of technology, geopolitical uncertainties, and calls for ‘decolonisation’. This seminar series explores the impact of these factors on the future of higher education.

Friday, 3 February 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

In 2021, the British Government announced and put in train a ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific’ in defence, security, development and foreign policy. How has this fared in 2022, in the face of developments including political turmoil and economic difficulties in the UK, and the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

February 2, 2023 18:30-19:30 JST

In this workshop, we are aiming to present up-to-date approaches to linguistic identity and multilingualism. Focusing on linguistic identity as emerged through various forms of natural speech, we will discuss how transnationalism, migration, pandemic, and digital communication affect linguistic identities.