The International and Global Studies program will host Ed Pulford from noon to 1:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 18, in CORD 349 for his talk, "Time and History Across China's Northeastern Borders."

Lunch will be provided. All are welcome! Please RSVP via HogSync.

About the talk

In many global locations, crossing state borders involves a sense of temporal shift. As migrants or travellers, modern citizen-subjects perceive a world divided into realms of greater or lesser "development" or "backwardness," containers for the big-H national Histories written following European Enlightenment and empire. Yet inhabitants of (post)socialist states such as China, Russia and North Korea are inheritors of particularly intense constructions of both linear state borders and linear senses of time.

As this talk explores drawing on a new book, at the three-way convergence of these countries populations with comparably profound but also very different experiences of socialism and its ambivalent aftermaths interact regularly. Everyday cross-border encounters bring the temporal ideas spawned by Maoist, Soviet and Kimist socialisms and what has followed into direct, and in doing so shed unique light on the progressive state projects which have swept this borderland. As a decade of fieldwork shows, borderlanders here remain haunted by divergent visions of progress and struggle to see their neighbours as "coevals" in an era increasingly defined by the "rise" of China.

About Ed Pulford

Pulford is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on cross-border approaches to experiences of socialism and empire across Eurasia. His new monograph, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia and Korea came out in May 2024 with Stanford University Press. His first book, Mirrolands: Russia, China and Journeys in Between, was published in 2019.

Please contact Kelly Hammond with any questions regarding this event: kah018@uark.edu.

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About International and Global Studies: International & Global Studies is an interdisciplinary program in the Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences. But the entire world is our classroom. Our faculty and students draw on multiple disciplinary perspectives to study the processes and outcomes of global integration, the theory and practice of international relations, and the dynamics of cultural exchange. Along the way, we explore a number of global issues, including migration flows and refugee crises, the challenges of economic development, food security and sovereignty, and conflict and peacebuilding, among many others. Our majors are students who have an interest in international affairs, who want a degree with an interdisciplinary focus, who wish to learn, work, or serve in an international or intercultural environment. For more information, visit our website.