Indonesian Potluck
Saturday, March 2, 2024, 5pm to 7pm
CU聽Rec Center,聽Ice Overlook Large Meeting Room
Please join a potluck!
BRING YOUR FAVORITE DISH TO SHARE WITH EVERYONE!
(720) 541-0104
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and the Metropolitan State University Denver Asian Studies Program.
鈥淲e are the twins of Komodo dragons鈥�: Multispecies Kinship and Indigenous Spatial politics in Indonesia鈥檚 Ecotourism Frontiers
Friday, March 1, 3:35pm
Guggenheim 205
Dr. Cypri Jehan Paju Dale
Research Fellow
University of Wisconsin Madison
In Komodo National Park, the natural habitat of world鈥檚 largest living lizard known as聽Komodo dragon听(Varanus komodoensis)聽and the indigenous people of聽Ata Modo, a zoning system has been instrumental in the process of commodification of the dragon and the transformation of its habitat into聽 an ecotourism frontier. This talk draws upon an ethnographic and historical analysis of the two large scale ecotourism projects administered by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Indonesian government 聽in the park in the last 30 years:聽first,聽to analyze the mobilization of a zoning system as a tool of control over the protected area and its inhabitants in order to ease the capitalist expansion to the indigenous and multispecies territory and聽second, to elucidate the articulation of Indigenous spatial politics that relies on the revitalization of multispecies kinship relationship with the Komodo dragons to contest the exclusionary nature of the new tourism industry. While the zoning system鈥攁nd indeed the whole logic of conservation and ecotourism鈥� is based on the modernist separation and hierarchy between human and nature, indigenous spatial politics relies on the intimate relationship with the dragon, perceived in聽 the indigenous cosmology as twins of the human that were born from the same mother and share the same living space on the islands. The presentation wishes to contribute to the conversation on the political ecology of ecotourism by highlighting ecotourism both as a discourse and policy regime that merge conservation and economic development and its entanglement with spatial politics as a process of negotiating social and environmental relationships in the increasingly disruptive capitalist world.
Part of the 精品SM在线影片 Geography Colloquium series, co-sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies.
Anthropology of Japan Series: As Intelligent as its Authors: Writing Conversational Artificial Intelligence in Japan
Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom
Register in advance:聽
Dr. Elizabeth Rodwell
Assistant Professor, Department of Information & Logistics Technology University of Houston
Behind the scenes of every chatbot and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) system is the labor of conversation designers, whose work lies somewhere between the application of user experience principles and the art of script writing. Conversation designers construct the voices and polish the tone that gives these tools a personality (or tries to avoid one). Based on ongoing fieldwork at a Japanese Conversational AI startup, I discuss how one team of conversation designers is shaping a GPT-based tool to help measure students鈥� English language competency and help them practice without self-consciousness. This project has recently gotten a lot of attention in the Japanese press, but those who tell its story frequently forget about the contribution of anyone except the engineers- especially the linguists, psychologists, and teachers who are this tool鈥檚 voice.聽