Date:
Location:
Asia Center Seminars
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Korea Institute and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies
Speaker: Julie Tian Miao, Associate Professor in Property and Economic Development, University of Melbourne; Visiting Scholar, Harvard University Asia Center
Moderator: Anthony J. Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs; Director, Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy School
Abstract: Drawing insights from three relevant yet largely separated fields of scholarship on diaspora, science policies, and (extra-)territorial development, Professor Julie Miao will conceptualize and assess how Asian tech diasporas experience knowledge space as an assemblage of ‘ethnoscape’ and ‘ideoscape’ – terms used by Appadurai, 1990 to chart the global landscapes of modernity. Focusing on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean diasporas working in biotech and related sectors in the Boston Metropolitan area, her study used ethnography and thick descriptions to examine the forming of Asian diasporas’ lived and worked experience as part of the ethnoscape and how it is shaping and shaped by the ideoscape of their homeland. Emerging evidence shows that inter-generation differences in the forming and evolving of an ethnoscape are much stronger than the inter-nationality differences; the stereotypical views about Asia and Asian people are as much self-reinforced as they are externally imposed. Most Asian tech diaspora members aim to embed themselves in the host country’s science and technology landscape, and it is the United States' extraterritorial and national security policies that are exerting a far more significant impact on their career projections and ambitions compared to their homeland.
Biography of the speaker: Julie Tian Miao is an Associate Professor in Property and Economic Development in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow, a visiting scholar of the Asian Center at Harvard University (2022-2023), and an Honorary Fellow in Shanghai Jiaotong University and Henan University, China. In 2017 Julie also held a Visiting Fellowship in Hong Kong University. Previously she worked as Lecturer in Urban Planning and Development in Glasgow University, convening the Master Programme of Urban Economics and Planning in the Glasgow-Nankai Joint Graduate School, after she worked as Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow in the Housing Research Centre of St Andrews University, UK. Currently Julie is on the Editorial Board of Urban Geography and Transactions in Planning and Urban Research. She has previously worked as the Co-Editor-in-Chief for Regions and associate Editor for Regional Studies, Regional Science. She has been a Trustee and sit on the Board of Regional Studies Association in the past ten years.
Julie was awarded her PhD in Economic Geography and Planning by University College London, supervised by the late Professor Sir Peter Hall. Her research and teaching interests cover the economics, planning and the built environment of the knowledge economy, knowledge workers, housing market dynamics and affordability, as well as innovative, informal and entrepreneurial urbanism. Funded by the Regional Studies Association, British Academy, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and Australia Housing and Urban Research Institute among others, Julie has conducted a series of research projects looking at housing, innovation/science parks, knowledge workers, urban transformation and new typologies of neighbourhood, and developed a unique set of intersecting interests on the contribution of housing and real estate to knowledge economy and designated science spaces in particular. She has published widely on Environment and Planning, Urban Studies, Regional Studies and Housing Studies. She is also the lead editor of Making 21st Century Knowledge Complexes: Technopoles of the world revisited (Routledge), which is a Routledge Best Book Award Nominee (2016) and being translated into Chinese. You can find her current ARC research project on Innovation Infrastructure here.
***
For more information, please visit here.