PLEASE NOTE VENUE CHANGE

In association with the annual Shorenstein Journalism Award for Asia, conferred this year on China's pioneering Caixin Media group, this panel will look at the current state and the future of the Chinese media. The Chinese state continues to play a powerful role in controlling the media and the free flow of information to the Chinese people. But China's media is undergoing rapid change, from the growing role of social media to the proliferation of new publications, some of which, like Caixin, are challenging the boundaries of state control. Which will win in China's changing media landscape—the forces of the market, state censorship, or quality journalism?

PANELISTS

Hu Shuli, editor-­in-chief of Caixin Media, and dean of the School of Communications and Design at Sun Yat-sen University, has a distinguished career that spans both print and broadcast journalism. Hu is a former Stanford Knight Journalism Fellow (1994) and a recipient of the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism (2007). She is frequently named on annual Who’s Who lists by publications such as Foreign Policy and Time Magazine.

Wang Shuo, managing editor of Caixin Media, was ranked among China’s top 10 young editors in 2011. He is a former international editor for People’s Daily, a Chinese government-run newspaper published nationally. Recognized as one of the brightest rising stars in his field, Wang was named as a Young Leader in 2007 and 2008 by the Boao Forum for Asia, and as a media leader by the World Economic Forum. He has led the investigative journalism teams at Caixin.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director at the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, and is also a former jury member for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He has written extensively on China, and was awarded the 1997 George Peabody Award for producing the groundbreaking documentary the Gate of Heavenly Peace. He received the Shorenstein Journalism Award in 2003.

Hu Ben, a journalist with Southern Weekend, is the current Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Knight Fellow at Stanford. He started his journalism career in 2005, when he joined a writer's network blogging about international affairs not covered by official media. At Southern Weekend, he has written about how Chinese government works, how public policies are made, and how information flows inside the government.

Daniel Sneider serves as the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC and also as a research associate with the prestigious National Asia Research Program. He frequently contributes articles to publications such as Foreign Policy, Asia Policy, and Slate and had three decades of experience as a foreign correspondent and editor for publications including the Christian Science Monitor and the San Jose Mercury News. 

ABOUT THE AWARD

The Shorenstein Journalism Award was launched in 2002 to recognize the contributions of Western journalists in deepening our understanding of Asia. In 2011, the recipients of the award have been broadened to encompass Asian journalists who are at the forefront of the battle for press freedom in Asia and who have played a key role in constructing a new role for the media, including the growth of social media and Internet-based journalism. The award will also identify those Asian journalists who, from that side of the Pacific Ocean, have aided the growth of mutual understanding between Asia and the United States.

Carrying a cash prize of $10,000, the award was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and on the press: Shorenstein APARC in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Read the 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award press release for more details about Caixin and about the history of the award.

Stanford Law School is sponsoring a conference titled, "The Constitution and the World," on October 27-28, 2011. Scholars, many with experience in the State Department or other government posts, will address the reach of constitutional rights outside U.S. territory, the potential effect of treaties on constitutional structure and rights, and the effect of globalization and international institutions on sovereignty. (More details are provided below.)

During the conference, Professor Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar will also be moderating a panel discussion, "Does the Constitution Apply Abroad?," (on Friday, October 28th, from 1:15-3:30pm).

If you are interested in attending this event, please plan to register at the following website:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/forms/conworld_participant.fb

What are the limits of literary freedom? Writers' claims for autonomy have encountered legal restrictions to their freedom of speech.  As suggested by Foucault, censorship has shaped the very notion of authorship. This talk will confront the diverging conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them through the debates surrounding literary trials, including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II. In reaction to these conceptions, writers developed their own code of ethics, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public  intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.

Gisèle Sapiro is Research director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is also head of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris, and been a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and at NYU, among other places. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, literature, publishing and translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; forthcoming in English translation with Duke University Press), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (19e-20e siècles) (Seuil, 2011), and of numerous articles published in journals of sociology, history, political science, aesthetics and literature, cultural studies and French studies. She is also editor or co-editor of Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), and L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009).

Co-sponsored by:  The Europe Center, Department of French and Italian, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of the Novel, Department of Sociology, DLCL Research Unit on Literature and Ethics, Hebrew Literature Workshop, and the French Culture Workshop

Event Summary

Sapiro describes how writers during the inter-war period were targeted for social and political subversion, and even accused of being responsible for the French military defeat. The belief in the power of the written word, a legacy from the French Revolution, along with the Catholic fear of the dangers of reading, contributed to the perception of the printed word as a vehicle for inciting crime. Censorship was prevalent, with many prosecutions for writing and publishing carried out during the 19th century.

Sapiro traces how this repression led to the development of two competing ideas of professional ethics around writing: the idea of art for art's sake, and the political commitment of public intellectuals. She also describes the application of objective and subjective responsibility theories, ideas about criminality, and the absence of a professional ethics in writing, to the laws of free press during this period. Sapiro outlines several specific cases of prosecution against prominent authors in France, and the variety of arguments used in the defense - sometimes unsuccessfully.

A discussion session following the talk raised such questions as: How does the identity of the author relate to concepts of citizenship? Could the trials of authors be considered a form of censorship? Were there structural similarities between the trials and the public debate? Was there any reaction in the literary realm? Was there ever any criticism about the legal mechanism as the appropriate arena for discussing this moral debate? Why wasn't the debate held within the government?

The second conference in the multi-year TEC-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute project on the reconciliation of divided regions and societies.

Conference Summary
By Roland Hsu, Associate Director, the Europe Center, and Kathryn Ciancia, (Ph.D., Stanford).

The Europe Center, with project partner the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, hosted the major international conference at Stanford University (May 17-18, 2012), dedicated to “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions”.  This conference was aimed to deepen our understanding of disputes over history, and to find ways towards resolving conflictual memory.  Participants – all leaders in their field, and representing voices from U.S., European, Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab worlds – were challenged to answer:

• What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
• How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
• How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past”?
• How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
• What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?

Participants included:
Khalil, Gregory (Telos Group)
Göçek, Müge (Univ. of Michigan)
Milani, Abbas (Stanford)
Bashir, Bashir (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Barkan, Elazar (Columbia)
Karayanni, Michael (The Hebrew University)
Confino, Alon (University of Virginia)
Bartov, Omer (Brown)
Cohen, Mitchell (Baruch)
Eshel, Amir (Stanford)
Glendinning, Simon (LSE)
Motzkin, Gabriel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Naimark, Norman (Stanford)
Penslar, Derek (Toronto)
Rouhana, Nadim (Tufts)
Uhl, Heidemarie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Zerubavel, Yael (Rutgers)
Zipperstein, Steven (Stanford)

Notes and Highlights
In his opening remarks, Amir Eshel, Director of The Europe Center, situated the conference within its wider context—a series under the title “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies,” which began with a conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem in May 2011.  Eshel posed the question of why Stanford’s Europe Center should focus on issues relating to the wider Middle East, particularly the historic and ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  In answering his own question, Eshel argued that the European Union had begun to look closely at its own neighborhood, with a particular emphasis on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED), which explores questions of migration, religion, and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.  As such questions are important in both Europe and the EUROMED region, scholars who work on Europe need to think within a broader geographical context that stretches beyond Old Europe or even the European Union.

Amir Eshel also introduced some of the key ideas that informed the conference. Questions of memory and history have been central to academic discourse over the past three decades.  Indeed, memory and history have taken on a crucial, even obsessive, dynamic.  Where are we today in this global interdisciplinary conversation?  Can the study of memory help us to understand the conflicted societies of the greater Middle East?  Can the huge scholarly interest in such subjects help us to think in new ways about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians?  Can the European experience of dealing with difficult memories aid us as we try to understand Israeli and Palestinian memories of the 1948 Nakba?  What is the role of historical research, on the one hand, and cultural remembrance, on the other, in promoting reconciliation and cohabitation? Since the conference aimed to focus less on the peace process in the Middle East and more on attempts at reconciliation and cohabitation, he urged participants to consider how Israelis and Palestinians might live together

In order to highlight work that had recently been undertaken, Eshel then focused on the fields of historical research and cultural discourse.  Over the past few decades, he argued, narratives have become increasingly crucial in the historiography, much of the impetus coming from so-called critical historiography.  For instance, the last decade has witnessed the publication of Motti Golani and Adel Manna’s Two Sides of the Coin, which presents two narratives of the Nakba of 1948.  In this multi-perspective narrative, the conflict is presented as one of both territory and historical memory.  Similarly, Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss’s Haifa Before and After 1948 was co-authored by Israelis and Palestinians and features fourteen different narratives.  A further collection, entitled Zoom In: Palestinian Refugees of 1948, Remembrances, deals with contemporary memories of the Nakba.  All three books were published by the Institute For Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the Republic of Letters, while the Van Leer Institute and Al-Quds University in Palestinian East Jerusalem have also published a series of schoolbooks that present similar multi-perspective narratives.

In addition to the changes in the historiography, there has been a shift in the cultural discourse, exemplified by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani (2012), which details the experiences of one Palestinian family and includes a map of Jaffa-Tel Aviv featuring Palestinian sites that vanished in 1948. The fact that Hilu’s novel received critical acclaim and was commercially successful indicates a new willingness on the part of Israelis to learn about the Palestinian experience.  Eshel has himself just completed a book comparing post-Second World War German and Austrian cultural memory with Israeli cultural memory of 1948. Since Palestinians and Israelis are bound to live together, Eshel argued that the solutions depend on narratives of the past, with history at the center of the discussion.  Throughout the conference, participants were urged to ask themselves two questions: Can we do more? Can we do better?   

Video casts of select sessions of the conference are available on Stanford YouTube.

Titles of the sessions are:

• History and Memory Welcome and Introduction (Amir Eshel and Gabriel Motzkin)
• Session 1:  "Memory and the Philosophy of History" (Gabriel Motzkin) and “From Rational Historiography to Delusional Conspiracies: Travails of History in Iran” (Abbas Milani)
• Session 2:“The Public and Private Erasure of History and Memory: Ottoman Empire, Turkish Republic and the Case of the Collective Violence against the Armenians (1789-2009)” (Fatma Müge Göçek)  and “The Shoah and the Logics of Comparison: The place of the Jewish Holocaust in Contemporary European Memory” (Heidemarie Uhl)
• Session 4:  America, Prolepsis and the 'Holy Land' (Gregory Khalil) and “Neutralizing History and Memory in Divided Societies” (Bashir Bashir)
• Session 5:  "Role of Historical Memory in Conflict Resolution" (Elazar Barkan) and “I Forgive You” (Simon Glendinning)
• Session 6: "Historicizing Atrocity as a Path to Reconciliation" (Omer Bartov) and “A Memory of One’s Own: History, Political Change and the Meaning of 1977” (Mitchell Cohen)

Plans for the Next Conference
The final session involved a Round Table discussion in which participants had the opportunity to reflect on the larger themes of the conference and to suggest ways in which the dialogue could be fruitfully continued.  Three of the conference organizers began with their own reflections on the conference before the discussion was opened up to all participants.  Norman Naimark pointed to three key ideas that he had learned from the proceedings.  The first was the concept that history and memory should not necessarily be seen as distinct entities.  Second, Naimark pointed to the importance of comparative approaches, citing Derek Penslar’s presentation as a good example.  While the conference did not deal with the fields of Eastern European, Russian, and German history, external scholarly interjections into these fields have made them places of stimulating debate. Finally, since there is much that we do not know about 1948, Naimark urged the creation of a history that would place those events within a much broader chronological context, just as Omer Bartov is doing for the town of Buczacz.  In his remarks, Gabriel Motzkin focused on the relationship between memory and the ongoing political process in Israel.  He expressed agreement with Nadim Rouhana that Jewish Israelis need to recognize Palestinian memories, but added that Palestinians have to acknowledge the Jewish religious project in which the land of Israel occupies the same place that salvation does for Christians.  Finally, Amir Eshel urged participants to consider the role of the “practical past”—how do we use the past in order to engage the present and imagine the future? He suggested that there are a variety of possible political solutions, but that there is also a long list of actions that the present Israeli government could take in order to aid reconciliation, including acts of apology and acknowledgment.

The organizers express their deep appreciation to the conference participants.  They also support the keen interest in continuing the work on this subject and the larger project, with follow-up programming.  The next conference in this series, from the Europe Center-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, will be announced at The Europe Center website.