Louisa Schein organized and convened an international workshop, titled: “The Social Lives of Keywords: Lenses on China,” in Hong Kong on January 9-12, 2018. This was funded by a competitive grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
The four-day event took place at the Royal Park Hotel and involved fourteen scholars representing the United States, Europe, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Activities included workshopping key terms such as ethnicity/minzu, nation/guojia, race/zhongzu, tribe/buluo, culture/wenhua, for an inaugural themed volume of the Chinese-English Keywords Project (CEKP), as well as soliciting input on advancing the project from seven invited Hong Kong scholars. CEKP is a growing global network of scholars interested in tracking the conceptual incommensurabilities and generative gaps that emerge when key concepts travel between English and Chinese. Aiming to capture the “social lives” of terms in distinct contexts, humanities and social science scholars in the CEKP will collaborate to produce a series of volumes in both Chinese and English. Future volume themes are to include gender/sexuality, media/communications, environment/health, and class/consumption.
