Reflections and Representations
The Cultural Sustainability and Sustained Political Imperfections in Lin Yutang’s Novels View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hsiaohui Chang
Lin Yutang (1895-1976) wrote eight novels in English, whose historical background is from the end of Qing Dynasty to the beginning of the 21st century. Lin’s purpose of writing the first novel, Moment in Peking, is to invite the readers to watch the Chinese scenery and culture. He also wrote the influence of the West in China in this novel. Then he narrated Chinese immigrants’ life in New York City in Chinatown Family. He described the indigenous people and European immigrants living peacefully on a Pacific island in Looking Beyond. Lin’s motives for creation is from introducing various culture and philosophy to achieving world peace. This paper discusses the three common topics of his novels. First, religion and philosophy. As a Chinese pastor’s son, Lin once declared that he was a pagan, explored Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, and finally went back to the church. Second, cultural communication. Lin not only introduced Chinese tradition and customs to Western readers but also depicted the influence of Western medical treatment and education on the Chinese. Third, international relations and an ideal world. The two world wars made Lin notice that there was not a perfect regime. He explained how difficult it is to make world peace come true by the characters in the novels. Actually, he wrote essays to express his own opinion directly, while he presented the diverse views of people of different ages, races, and genders in the novels.
On Envisioned Future Cities: Pedagogical Explorations in General Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lily Wei
This paper presents the pedagogical process, the student works, and the instructor’s reflective analysis of “The Future City” project. This project is the culmination of « Art and the City », a general elective course at Ching Yuan Christian University, Taiwan. In this course, students are first introduced to the theories of flâner, soundwalk, basic design, as well as various types of urban art. As a final assignment, students integrate their knowledge from lectures and their discussion with peers to envision their own “Future City” underpinned by urban sustainability. Whether it is ensuring the longevity of valuable cultural assets or designing for the well being of future generations, the students’ works reflect their values and their imagining of the sustainable future city. The study also contemplates the significance of the pedagogy applied in “The Future City” project.
A Vision on the Synergy of Environmental Policies Based on the Shapley Value View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicole Vásquez
Several studies have already accounted for interactions between instruments of climate policy and their negative, positive or neutral synergistic effects on overall emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is little evidence that delves into the specific strategic implications of such interactions and resulting synergies, when it comes to addressing pollutant emissions. We then develop simple, yet useful games to investigate, from a Shapley Value perspective, how a group of synergistic environmental policies can collectively achieve greater emissions reductions. The players in the games represent three different environmental policies, namely emission trading scheme, innovation support policy and labelling information provision policy. Moreover, reduction targets and synergy factors are considered in such games to explore collective effectiveness and marginal contributions of policies. The initial results unsurprisingly show that the emission trading scheme policy, which entails the most significant emissions reduction target, delivers the greater marginal contribution. However, the innovation support policy, which entails the more reasonable emissions reduction target, outperforms the other policies in terms of marginal contribution, when it largely meets the expected target, even when the remaining policies exhibit a similar performance. Furthermore, for specific (estimated) levels of synergy, the labelling information provision policy delivers the lowest marginal contribution. These findings provide opportunities for assessing the pertinence and relevance of implementing particular policies in conjunction with others, and encourage further research concerning strategic implications of joint implementation and interactions of environmental policies.
