Innovative Online SOAS Taiwan Studies Summer School Open to All

For the second year the Taiwan Studies department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS) will hold their summer school online from June 28 to July 2. As usual it boasts a packed and exciting program with much to appeal to anyone with a strong interest in Taiwan.

This year’s program, which is open to all and free to attend, reflects the both lessons learned from over a year of online academia due to the Covid-19 pandemic — with some innovative programming choices — and the specialties of current visiting research staff to the Taiwan Studies department.

The themes go beyond the purely academic and several sessions have broken away from the formal format, such as the A conversation with … sessions.

“Often formal academic lectures can be hard to stay focused on online, especially when we all have too much screen time,” said SOAS Director of Taiwan Studies Dafydd Fell. “So I find more interactive dialogue sessions can be quite fruitful especially when they are with practitioners. We have many dialogue sessions this time with film makers, social movement activists and even book series editors. In other words, we are trying to balance the purely academic with more practical sides of topics such as filmmaking and advocacy. We will normally start off with a set of guiding questions but often then we’ll see where the conversation will take us.”

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, and Lin Hsinyi of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) are just two of leads in such sessions.

Similarly, the scope of sessions on publishing on Taiwan is widened this year with several speakers specializing in publishing for a general audience, including Michael Cannings from Camphor press in the “Publishing in Taiwan Studies: Meet the Book Series Editors” panel, and Sam Robbins of Taiwan Insight, Brian Hioe of New Bloom and Emily Y. Wu of Ghost Island Media in the “Public Scholarship” / “Writing Taiwan for a General Audience” panel.

While the latter panel will offer tips on effective writing on Taiwan for writers, Fell points to the practical element of this inclusion for SOAS students. “I often find myself encouraging my students to try to publish revised versions of things that they write for courses at SOAS. One good way of doing this is on platforms such as Taiwan Insight or New Bloom Magazine. Another popular way of reaching broader audiences is podcasting. So we thought it would be great to bring in some speakers to offer advice to students about how to get things published on Taiwan Studies blogs or podcasts.”

According to Fell, Robbins is an alumnus of SOAS, currently completing his MA at NTU, and Hioe and Wu have, deservedly, made quite the impact over at SOAS.

“Many of my students are big fans of Brian Hioe’s work at New Bloom and he’d been one of the stars of our 2019 Summer School,” adds Fell. “Emily Wu’s work on Ghost Island Media is also really special and having appeared on their podcast I was so impressed.”

The summer school program, which started in 2007, is a highly anticipated annual event which is usually held in-person on the SOAS campus. It is perhaps a reflection of the department’s desire to encourage knowledge and exploration of Taiwan and related themes that it is traditionally free to attend on campus.

This year’s main themes are Environmentalism in Taiwan and Taiwan Post New Wave Cinema. With a referendum set for this August the “Taiwan’s anti-nuclear movement in the run up to the 2021 Nuclear Power Station Referendum: A discussion with Environmental NGO Researcher Wei Yang and environmental scholar Simona Grano” is particularly timely.

“This year the University of Zurich’s Simona Grano’s joined us as a Research Associate,” said Fell, “and since she’s a foremost scholar in the study of environmental issues in Taiwan, it made sense to include these in our program while she’s with us.”

Taiwan’s new cinema and women directors Chen Ting-Ning, Lee Yi-Shan, Huang Xi, Fan Ching

Another session to watch for is the book launch for Taiwan’s Economic and Diplomatic Challenges and Opportunities. The book is co-edited by three SOAS alumni. Robert Ash graduated from SOAS in 1968 and was the founder of the Taiwan Program. Fell graduated in 2003 and Mariah Thornton was a SOAS MSc student graduating in 2017. It’s one of several sessions that Fell particularly recommends, “I really like the way the book engages in the debate about whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about Taiwan’s future.”

Fell acknowledges that the many may be becoming weary of online events due to an inability to recreate the interactive parts but, like others faced with the same dilemma, the team at SOAS have learned much over the past year about the design and practicalities of running such events online.

“Back last year it was the first time we had ever held a large online event so we were very nervous,” said Fell. “We’re definitely more experienced and confident after well over a year of online events and online teaching.

We’ve learnt on the importance of planning and making sure speakers are comfortable speaking online and testing equipment ahead of time. We also now think more in terms of different time zones both from the perspectives of speakers and potential audiences, while in the past we were purely centered on on-campus audiences.”

The SOAS Taiwan Studies department was founded in 1999 and is one of the leading university-level departments of the 19 such centers worldwide. It is currently the only center to offer a dedicated Taiwan Studies MA program outside of Taiwan. Last year the department used the money saved from flying in speakers for the summer school to fund two scholarships. This year there are six fee-waiver £5000 scholarships available and applications are open until June 30.

The sessions will be run on Microsoft Teams and the full Summer School program and registration link can be found on the SOAS website.

(Feature photo of SOAS Director of Taiwan Studies Dafydd Fell, by Jewel Lo)