919 research outputs found
Transborder
No full text“Transborder” Esther C. M. Yau The University of Hong Kong As a concept, “transborder” involves two main notions, “trans” and “border”. My discussion indicates that “transborder” as a notion has formative significance concerning the past, present, and future of Hong Kong as place and cultural space. Broadly speaking, Hong Kong’s historical formation, its identity affirmation, fluidity, and tensions, and its everyday politics and culture have connections with the rich implications of transborder. These implications are part of the history and everyday dynamics of the city of Hong Kong. They also shed light on the actual acts and imagined space of separation and crossing/connection with past and emergent consequences. Though not yet an existing term in the 1950s, transborder has been relevant and it has acquired different meanings throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The meanings are often taken as part of the debates and discourses on local(ism), national(ism), and global(ism). This discussion unpacks the concept by noting five main lines in the context of Hong Kong: 1) transborder as political and economic order: as such, the order is continuously managed and manipulated according to State(s) military, legal, and diplomatic powers, as what has come “from above”; 2) transborder as a tactical space, whereby responses to state power have manifested own logics and contradictions, as what continues “below”; 3) transborder as an imaginary or symbolic space of imagination whereby cultural writing have participated in constructing and transforming the collective memory and the identities of Hong Kong; 4) transborder as simulation and fantasy in neo-liberalist economics and capitalist globalization, and 5) transborder films and narratives of diaspora, homeland, nostalgia, and de/re/generation in Hong Kong cinema. (265 words
Visions of Grim beauty in Behemoth (2015) and Eco-traumas
No full text“Visions of grim beauty in Behemoth (2015) and eco-traumas” Abstract Esther Yau, University of Hong Kong Independent Chinese documentaries have depicted life in urbanizing China in contrast to mediatized images of communal harmony. With emphasis on immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty, digital documentaries of the past decade have taken the vantage point of the marginalized of the city and the borderlands to push back against restrictions imposed by the official system and the film market. Documentarist Zhao Liang, whose Petition (2009) uses a combination of observational approach, interviews, and hidden cameras, has taken sides with the powerless petitioners whose stories of untried incarceration, police beating, and horrific losses did not get resolved through the state petition system. A framing approach that recurs in the film is the foregrounding of displaced persons seeking justice and a livelihood on the street and in shanty shelters, either around Beijing’s everyday commotion, or with high-rises in a distance. This makes a spatial analogy of state violence and urban apathy against which the petitioners as well as the documentary stands in contestation. In Behemoth (2015), the ravaging of the Mongolian steppes with mountaintop mining connects the region to a “global industry chain”. A comparable spatial analogy in this documentary shows inhabitants grazing sheep, not far from the unending noise of mining trucks and coalmining blasts that continue to strip down the land. Without identifying any mining companies or authorities for obvious reasons, Behemoth pursued a poetic and contemplative approach using borrowed figures of inferno, purgatory, and paradise from Dante’s Divine Comedy to depict a “global industry chain” driven by universal greed. By referring to festival interviews, reviews, and selected aspects of the film, this paper attends to the adoption of artistic, poetic, and digital practices in the remaking of non-fiction mode in Behemoth. It engages the discussions of ecocide, bioregion, and anthropocene to consider the paradox and limitations in visualizing eco-traumas and in film ecocriticism. (305 words
A RIGID CALABI–YAU 3-FOLD
No full textInternational audienceThe aim of this paper is to analyze some geometric properties of the rigid Calabi–Yau threefold Z obtained by a quotient of E 3 , where E is a specific elliptic curve. We describe the cohomology of Z and give a simple formula for the trilinear form on P ic(Z). We describe some projective models of Z and relate these to its generalized mirror. A smoothing of a singular model is a Calabi–Yau threefold with small Hodge numbers which was not known before
Changes in tension regulates proliferation and migration of fibroblasts by remodeling expression of ECM proteins
No full textWound healing is a complicated but highly organized process in which cell migration and proliferation are actively involved. However, the process by which mechanical stretch regulates the proliferation and migration of human skin fibroblasts (HFs) and keratinocytes is poorly understood. Using a house built mechanical stretch device, we examined the HFs extracellular matrix (ECM) components changes under non-stretch, static stretch or cyclic stretch conditions. We further investigated the changes in ECM component protein expression levels in keratinocytes and analyzed the effects of individual ECM component on keratinocyte proliferation and migration. Particularly, the roles of calcium/calmodulin-dependent serine protein kinase (CASK) in the HF proliferation under cyclic stretch were investigated. Cyclic stretch suppressed HF proliferation compared with HFs without stretch or with static stretch. Cyclic stretch also led to a significant reduction in the levels of collagen I and a marked increase of fibronectin in HFs ECM. By contrast, collagen I levels increased and fibronectin levels decreased in response to non-stretch and static stretch conditions. After cyclic stretch, the proliferation of keratinocytes was inhibited by the cyclic stretch-induced ECM in HFs. The inoculation of keratinocytes with single ECM component suggested that collagen I was more capable of inducing cell proliferation than fibronectin, while it had less impact on cell migration compared with fibronectin. Furthermore, cyclic stretch induced by proliferation inhibition was associated with altered integrin 1-CASK signal pathway. The present results demonstrated the existence of HF-ECM-keratinocyte cross-talk' in cutaneous tissues. Thus, the integrin 1-CASK signal pathway in HFs may be involved in the outside-in signal transduction of extracellular stretch and the altered ECM component expression
Fano manifolds of Calabi-Yau Hodge type
No full textInternational audienceWe introduce and we study a class of odd dimensional compact complex manifolds whose Hodge structure in middle dimension looks like that of a Calabi-Yau threefold. We construct several series of interesting examples from rational homogeneous spaces with special properties
Re-emergent multiplicities: Nanking and cosmopolitan memory
No full textThe International Conference on 'China-West: Cosmopolitics, Memory & Visual Media in the 21st Century', Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, The University of Hong Kong, Hong kong, 11-12 June 2010
What Can Small Festivals Do? Towards Festivals as Testimony to Expanded Civic Engagement in Post-Handover Hong Kong
No full textStarting around the year 2003, two small independent film festivals of the “corrective kind” appeared in the city of Hong Kong. The Chinese Documentary Festival (CDF) and the Social Movement Film Festival (SMFF) began as festivals to raise awareness of the viable form of documentary cinema and the use of documentary films in the culture of open dissent. The former showcases Chinese-language documentaries from the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, as well as other Chinese diasporas. The latter include Chinese-language documentaries along with documentaries and protests videos from overseas. They were energized by a boom in independent digital documentaries in the PRC and Taiwan, well-documented in recent studies (Berry, Lu, and Rofel, 2010). The CDF is devoted to correcting the limiting and myopic views of cinema dominated by narrative feature films, and the SMFF is devoted to correcting corporate propaganda on the benefits of neoliberal economics and capitalist globalization. Both are connected to regional documentary festival networks and the SMFF has links to the makers and curators of documentaries of dissent as well as protest videos. A growing culture of civic engagement in post-Handover Hong Kong has seen participation of young citizens in public activities of dissent regarding social injustices, government politics, and local resources. Independent documentaries featured in these two festivals have observed, investigated, and intervened in social issues. Some confront authorities with reasoned points of view, others dwell on embodied experiences of the daily and special variety, and all engage in translating what the camera beholds into audio-visual forms. They provide a space for the audience to acquire imagination and experience for expanded, translocal civic engagement. This chapter considers the local translatability of the culture of dissent in festival practices of awareness and participation. I situate CDF and SMFF within festival and dissent cultures that include: 1) the culture and network of major film festivals, and 2) the culture and network of open dissent involving demonstration events and the use of auditory-visual materials. I examine the ways these festivals have adopted and translated from the culture of open dissent into festival practices that depart from the main concern to exhibit cinema art on behalf of film industry, business, and the making of auteurs. Non-celebratory and participatory in nature, the small festivals exhibit a range of films that I argue to be able Sinophone civic engagement rather than “Chineseness”. They go along with the festivals’ own strategies of awareness and involvement that translate festival cultures and dissent cultures into local terms, through the practices of selection and adjudication, special activities, funding, networking, and training. The prospects of these festivals are validated with the borrowed term, “awareness economy” that intends to raise coordination of academia and industry to generate innovation. I adopt this notion to refer to the small festival networks forming a certain alternative cultural economy through the symbolic significance given to civic engagement as awareness of what documentaries can contribute to the culture of dissent on the one hand, and to the reproduction of independent documentaries on the other
A Study on the Acceptance of ECM Systems
No full textThe present paper summarizes selected results of the first au-thor‟s Master‟s thesis for the student track at the 10th Interna-tional Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik in Zurich, Switzer-land. The thesis was co-supervised by the second and the third author. Building upon the technology acceptance model (TAM), the assignment was to investigate factors impacting on end users‟ acceptance of enterprise content management (ECM) systems. The study suggests twenty-two factors at the enterprise, process, technology, and content level that can influence ECM success. The results are grounded in both a systematic review of the lite-rature on ECM, including related fields such as document man-agement and records management, and an analysis of qualitative data collected from five ECM-adopting organizations. It is hoped that the findings will inform future Information Systems (IS) research on ECM acceptance. Practitioners can use the results in the process of planning and conducting their own ECM projects
Urban displacement and eco-trauma in documentary testimony and surrealistic vision
No full textIndependent Chinese documentaries have depicted life in urbanizing China in contrast to mediatized images of communal harmony. With emphasis on immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty, digital documentaries of the past decade have taken the vantage point of the marginalized of the city and the borderlands to push back against restrictions imposed by the official system and the film market. Documentarist Zhao Liang, whose Petition (2009) uses a combination of observational approach, interviews, and hidden cameras, has sided with powerless petitioners whose stories of untried incarceration, police beating, and horrific losses did not get resolved through the state petition system. In many vignettes of the documentary, the Beijing cityscape with high-rises appears in a distance with shanty shelters and wastes occupying the foreground. This framing approach makes a spatial analogy of unattended injury that serves as a compelling visual strategy in addition to the demonstrative shots, interviews, distance views, and empathetic depictions in the documentary to give witness to displaced lives. In this paper, I examine the refinement and poetic remaking of the spatial analogy from Petition to Behemoth (2015), the latter depicts the lands of the Mongolian steppes ravaged by mountaintop mining and foundries. Taking Zhao Liang’s reference to Dante and reading selected images and scenes, my paper examines the eco-aesthetics, symbolic and near surrealistic spaces of purgatory/hell and silent workers in Behemoth. It discusses the ways that literary imagination is integrated with the non-fiction mode to visualize ecological traumas in the mining regions of Mongolia.(245 Words
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