Crafting Help and Hope in East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This proposed panel examines the changing practices and politics of help and hope in East Asian contexts. The panel has included papers on how giving help, once a conventional and communal socio-ethical form, has transformed into complex forms of organized volunteerism, international charity, and civic empowerment amid rapid urbanization, uneven economic development, and high frequency of natural disasters. Klien probes into the complexity of volunteer-local-resident relations by delineating individual incentives and subjective experiences of disaster volunteers in northeast Japan after the 311 Earthquake. Matte shifts the focus to the often-neglected human-non-human relations at animal rescue work in post-311. Kang’s paper examines the politics of help at the institutional level in post-earthquake southwest China by discussing the various coping strategies among NGOs of different backgrounds and resources under China’s one-party regime. Ling’s case study of the uneasy encounters between volunteers and migrant children deprived of full citizenship rights discusses the politics of hope under China’s entrenched rural-urban divide. Wu’s paper examines how urban volunteer work for the visually challenged in Beijing has become integral to the construction of urban identities and urban culture. These highly original ethnographic studies demonstrate how interactions between the helpers and the helped are complexly implicated in local organization politics, identity differences, and future imaginaries. They would further our understanding of the changing meanings and modalities of help and hope across time and space.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizers

• Minhua Ling, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Ka-ming Wu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Chair

• Minhua Ling, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Individual Presentations

• Disaster Volunteer Experiences in Northeastern Japan: Who is Helping Whom? - Susanne Klien, Hokkaido University

• “Shared Suffering” in Post-3.11 Animal Rescue Efforts - Seven Mattes, Michigan State University

• Navigating My Way to Help NGO Development in Dujiangyan after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake - YI Kang, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Hope Under the Same Sky: Helping Rural Migrant Children in Urban China - Minhua Ling, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Volunteering with Coffee, Marathon Running and Capstone Project: Helping the Visually Challenged in Beijing, China - Ka-ming Wu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong