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Hitotsubashi University Japanese Studies in English Lecture Series 2017
Theme: Social Division “State Violence and Technologies of Manipulation: North Korea and the Mediatized Voice of Victims” Speaker: Sandra Fahy (Sophia University)

2017/07/11

Date: July 20, 2017 (Thursday)
Time: 13:15-14:45
Venue: Mercury Hall (Mercury Tower, level 7)

Abstract:
What is North Korea’s response to allegations about its rights abuses? Did
the UN Commission of Inquiry Report of 2014 – which identified the North
Korean state as responsible at the highest level for crimes against
humanity – provoke any change in the way the state engages rights? To
answer these questions, my talk draws on a huge corpus of web-scrapped
data, both video and print, from North Korea’s online media to examine
domestic coverage of rights and international engagement on the topic. In
this talk, I take you on a journey into the heady landscape of North
Korea’s response to the UN report: from emotional news reportage, to
defector-denouncing documentaries, to street demos, to interviews with the
man-on-the-street (and one woman), to citizen-interviews with Will Ripley
of CNN. The talk concludes by showing, discursively and forensically, the
North Korean state as ventriloquist throwing its interpretation of human
rights, and the UN rights report, into the mouths of citizens.

Profile:
Sandra Fahy earned her PhD in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and
African Studies (UK) in 2009. She is currently Associate Professor of
Anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts, at Sophia University, where
she teaches courses on Korean Studies, Human Rights, Visual and Discourse
Research Methods, and Medical and Linguistic Anthropology. Fahy’s research
has focused on structural violence and collective social suffering with
particular reference to North Korea, and by extension South Korea, Japan
and China. Her publications include: *Marching through Suffering: Loss and
Survival in North Korea*. New York: Columbia University Press (2015), peer
review articles in *Anthropology Today*; *Food, Culture and Society: an
interdisciplinary journal* among others. Her second book *Human Rights and
North Korea *is under contract with Columbia University Press.

For venue map, see
http://www.hit-u.ac.jp/eng/about/direction/guide/campus/e-campus/

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