AREA Ruhr Book Talk Series

Youngah Guahk’s book explores the crucial issue of sustainable transition in modern industrial societies by focusing on local dynamics in South Korea. As urbanization continues, eco-city development has become especially important in East Asia, and Guahk’s work highlights key aspects of urban sustainability. The book examines specific cases of Korean local governments pursuing sustainable urban de...

What role did Koreans in Japan play in the discourse on Japan’s colonial and East Asian policies when exchanging views with Japanese intellectuals of Protestant faith? Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Korean sources, this 2024 publication examines how these actors negotiated Japanese colonial rule in Korea and the “Korean question” in relation to regional and global contexts and how their i...

In socialist China, the state forestry and timber sectors employed men as official state workers, while women participated as family dependents and collective laborers. Starting in the 1950s, these groups transformed rural landscapes into urban-industrial zones. This makes forestry an exceptional case for examining how government policies shaped and reinforced interconnected dualisms—such as those...

This 2024 publication examines the contrasting outcomes of the Chinese Empire’s conquests of Sichuan and Vietnam with a focus on the dynamics between central auhority and local autonomy, as they are evident in the transformation of sacred sites. The Experiential Architecture Analysis (EAA) introduced in this book offers a framework to examine spatial-social interactions, which provided new insight...

This episode’s publication is a collection of six chapters that analytically examine former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung’s philosophy, ideas, policies, achievements, and commitment to democracy, human rights, and peace, and use them to assess the current state of democracy and human rights in today’s South Korea. Edited by Jin-Wook Shin, the 2024 volume is part of a series of books publishe...

In her first monograph, published in 2023, Dorothea Mladenova looks at the practice of organizing one’s own death (shūkatsu 終活) as a neoliberal self-optimization tool against the backdrop of the super-ageing and “super-dying” society. Her analysis suggests that the ideal of taking care of others has been transformed into a maxim of taking care of oneself. Dorothea Mladenova studied Japanese Stud...