Stanford University

Media

The Sunflower Movement and the Future of Taiwan's Political Culture

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Abstract 
Based on first-hand participant-observation, this talk will examine the culture, politics, and spatiality of the Sunflower Movement. Taiwan's most significant social movement in decades, the Sunflower Movement not only blocked the passage of a major trade deal with China, but reshaped popular discourse and redirected Taiwan's political and cultural trajectory. It re-energized student and civil society, precipitated the historic defeat of the KMT in the 2014 local elections, and prefigured the DPP's strong position coming into the 2016 presidential and legislative election season.
 
The primary spatial tactic of the Sunflowers-- occupation of a government building-- was so successful that a series of protests in the summer of 2015 by high school students was partly conceived and represented as a "second Sunflower Movement". These students, protesting "China-centric" curriculum changes, attempted to occupy the Ministry of Education building. Thwarted by police, these students settled for the front courtyard, where a Sunflower-style pattern of encampments and performances emerged. While this movement did not galvanize the wider public as dramatically as its predecessor, it did demonstrate the staying power of the Sunflower Movement and its occupation tactics for an even younger cohort of activists.
 
The Sunflower Movement showed that contingent, street-level, grassroots action can have a major impact on Taiwan's cross-Strait policies, and inspired and trained a new generation of youth activists. But with the likely 2016 presidential win of the DPP, which has attempted to draw support from student activists while presenting a less radical vision to mainstream voters, what's in store for the future of Taiwanese student and civic activism? And with strong evidence of growing Taiwanese national identification and pro-independence sentiment, particularly among youth, what's in store for the future of Taiwan's political culture? 
 

Speaker Bio

Ian Rowen in Legislative Yuan Ian Rowen in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan during the Sunflower Student Movement protest.

Ian Rowen is PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and recent Visiting Fellow at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan, Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, and Fudan University. He participated in both the Sunflower and Umbrella Movements and has written about them for The Journal of Asian Studies, The Guardian, and The BBC (Chinese), among other outlets. He has also published about Asian politics and protest in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming) and the Annals of Tourism Research. His PhD research, funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, has focused on the political geography of tourism and protest in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. 

 

Presentation Slides

Ian Rowen Doctoral Candidate University of Colorado Dept of Geography
Seminars

Twitter and the Rebranding of Narendra Modi

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joyojeet headshot

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has almost 15 million followers on Twitter and over almost 30 million “likes” on Facebook, making him among the most followed politicians on social media. With a mix of ‘feel good’ messages, shout-outs to other celebrities, well-timed ritualized responses, as well as a careful strategy of ‘followbacks’ for a small selection of his most active followers, Modi grew his following dramatically since 2013. This talk looks at ways in which Twitter is used as part of a larger brand management exercise through which Modi has emphasized different issues at various phases of his political evolution.

Joyojeet examines four specific phases, during each of which, the focus of his social media message evolved based on electoral or post-election needs. While Twitter helped Modi circumvent the mainstream media and directly reach a significant constituency of listeners, he also examines how social media was central to Modi's image shaping as a technology-savvy leader who represents pan-Indian aspirations of modernity, away from Modi’s own past image in the popular media as a divisive communal politician.
 

Bio

Joyojeet Pal is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information where his work focuses on user experience and accessibility in low and middle-income countries. His recent research looks at the use of social media in political communication in India, specifically on the role of political branding online in India. He is one of the technical collaborators on the Unfinished Sentences project examining oral histories of the El Salvador civil war, and leads the Colombia Digital Culture project at the University of Michigan. He researched and produced the award-winning documentary, "For the Love of a Man" based on the fan following of South Indian film star Rajnikanth.  
 

 

Note: Those of you attending this talk may be interested in a related event, "Why India Matters", a talk by Richard Verma, 25th US Ambassador to India.

Wallenberg Theatre

450 Serra Mall #124

(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval).

On Politics and Satire: A Conversation with Bassem Youssef

Tickets are no longer available for this event. If you are interested in signing up for the notifications list, please visit the Stanford Ticket Office.  

This is a ticketed event, only guests with tickets will be admitted. Directions and parking information is available below. This event is hosted by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and co-sponsored by OpenXChange, Stanford in Government and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.  

 

 

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International media sensation and Egyptian political satirist Bassem Youssef, also known as the “Arab Jon Stewart,” will share with the Stanford community his thoughts on why political satire has come to embody an important element of modern day politics. He will also reflect on his own experience as the co-founder and host of the internationally acclaimed political satire talk show “Al-Bernameg.” Youssef will discuss the challenges and obstacles he faced in providing the Egyptian public alternative viewpoints on politics not represented by the mainstream news media.

 

Speaker Bio

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Named one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world” in 2013, Bassem Youssef is an Egyptian satirist, columnist, and talk show host. A cardiac surgeon by training, Youssef turned to comedy after he was inspired by the Egyptian revolution. He uploaded the first episode of his homemade newscast, “The B+ Show,” to YouTube in May 2011. After it garnered more than 5 million views in three months, Youssef was named the host of “Al-Bernameg,” a satirical newscast modeled after Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” Youssef’s bold, intelligent, and humorous critiques of Egyptian politics quickly became a hit with audiences in the country and garnered more than 40 million viewers. In 2012, Mohamed Morsi’s government pursued charges against Youssef for "insulting the president," “insulting Islam," and “reporting false news.” In March 2013, Youssef was briefly detained, released on bail, and fined. CBC suspended the broadcast of “Al-Bernameg” in November 2013. In 2014, Youssef announced that he was ending the program due to the dangerous political climate in Egypt. In the spring of 2015 Youssef served as a resident fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has recently been announced as the host of the International Emmy Awards gala of 2015.

 

Directions 

Via I-280 (north or south): LINK

From the east bay via CA-92 (San Mateo Bridge): LINK

Via US 101 (north or south): LINK

Additional directions are available here. 

 

Parking 

Parking Structure 7 offers underground parking at the Knight Management Center. Permits are required and enforced Monday through Friday from 8 am to 4 pm. Click here to access Campus Maps.

One-day visitor permits (called “scratchers”) allow for parking in any pay-and-display or metered space, and are available for purchase at the Parking and Transportation Services (P&TS) office for $12 each. Be sure to scratch off the correct date and hang your permit facing outward from your rear-view mirror. "A," "C," and "shared" resident/commuter lots are enforced Monday-Friday, 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. You are free to park in these areas after enforcement hours.

You can also pay for parking using the pay-by-space kiosks located in Structure 7. Simply enter the number for your parking space and pay with cash or card. You do not need to display your receipt in your vehicle. The receipt is not valid in any other location.

Other nearby parking locations include:

  • Parking lot at Bonair Siding Rd. and Serra St. — coin-meter spaces, two-minute walk
  • Parking lot at Memorial Way and Galvez St. — pay-and-display machine, five-minute walk
  • Visitor Center parking lot at 295 Galvez St. — pay-and-display machine, ten-minute walk
  • Parking Structure 6 at Campus Dr. East and Wilbur Way — pay-and-display machine, ten-minute walk

Meters are generally enforced 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., unless otherwise posted. You are free to park in these areas after enforcement hours.

More parking and permit information is available here.

We honor any state's disabled person placards in nearly all marked parking spaces on campus. Please visit the Persons with Disabilities page for more information.

Event Flyer
Download pdf

Cemex Auditorium, Knight Management Center

655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305

Bassem Youssef Egyptian Political Satirist Egyptian Political Satirist
Seminars
CDDRL Special Events
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Francisco dos Santos, “People’s Images” from Favela’s Observatory

Journalism from below in the Digital Age with P. Sainath

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The People's Archive of Rural India combines text, audio, video, and photographs to present what is both a living journal and a growing online archive. It's a unique and ambitious movement to document the diversity of rural India, home to 833 million people speaking 780 languages. PARI, http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/, is aimed at recording the everyday lives of everyday people, to document the stories from what Sainath has called the “continent within a sub-continent”.

The site was launched in December 2014. The website is not-for-profit, free to view and all the contributors – journalists, writers, film-makers, editors, translators, engineers, lawyers and accountants –  are volunteers. The website hopes to grow by public participation.

About the speaker
Over a career spanning 34 years, Sainath has won over 40 awards for his reporting, including the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award and the first Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Prize in 2000. His book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, has remained a non-fiction bestseller for decades and was declared a Penguin Classic in 2012. He is currently teaching two courses in the Program for South Asian Studies at Princeton University.
 
The People's Archive of Rural India, http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/, combines text, audio, video, and photographs to present a living journal and a growing online archive. It's a unique and ambitious movement to record everyday lives and to document the diversity of rural India, home to over a billion people speaking 780 languages. Launched in December 2014, the website is not-for-profit and free to view.  All the contributors – journalists, writers, film-makers, editors, translators, engineers, lawyers and accountants –  are volunteers. The website hopes to grow by public participation.
 
More on the archive:
 

The event is organized by Asha at Stanford and a similar event will be organized at UC Berkeley by the School of Information.

7:00 PM | Tuesday, May 5, 2015

"The Great Room"

Donald Kennedy Commons
Escondido Village
Comstock Circle, Stanford University
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/rde/cgi-bin/drupal/housing/frontdesk/kenn…


6:30 PM | Wednesday, May 6, 2015
210 South Hall
School of Information
UC Berkeley

Free and open to the public.
 

7:00 PM | Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Donald Kennedy Commons
Escondido Village
Comstock Circle, Stanford University

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/rde/cgi-bin/drupal/housing/frontdesk/kenn…

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