Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Stefan Huebner, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

North Korea’s topographies have long been harnessed in support of its politics, its maritime infrastructures historically serving politico-developmental narratives, forging new ‘socialist’ landscapes and geo-political connections. Little consideration has been given to the wider ‘web of life’ within these landscapes. Robert Winstanley-Chesters therefore considers North Korea’s coastal and maritime terrains as an assemblage of participants, what Jane Bennett has termed ‘vibrant’ matter, using Sindo Island at the mouth of the Amnok River as a case study. 1976 saw new landscapes of community, development and extraction emerging from the estuary as a cooperative was formed from coastal communities elsewhere. Sindo however slipped off Pyongyang’s developmental radar becoming a marginal, half-remembered site, its landscape degrading through institutional neglect, over fishing and climate change. Robert Winstanley-Chesters through fieldwork exercise and archival research examines mitigative strategies, histories and practices of other fishing communities in neighbouring nations such as Gageodo in South Korea and Tong Shui Gou in China. The paper also considers’ North Korea’s own historical strategies for the management of fish and aquaculture resources. With all of these in mind Robert Winstanley-Chesters explores how North Korea, its institutions and communities in neighbouring nations connected to the sea, have conceived and negotiated their place at historical, geo-political, regional and local scales, (re)constructing new forms of maritime materials and ‘vibrant matters’ in a North Korea of permanent transition and the wider realms of the Pacific in time of climate change and ecological crisis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Robert Winstanley-Chesters is a geographer, Lecturer at the University of Leeds and Birkbeck, University of London and formerly a Research Fellow at Australian National University and a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Cambridge University (Beyond the Korean War). Robert obtained his doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2013 with a thesis published the following year as “Environment, Politics and Ideology in North Korea” by Lexington Press (Rowman and Littlefield). Robert’s second monograph ‘Vibrant Matters(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Neighbours’ will be published in December 2019 by Springer Nature. His third ‘New Goddesses of Mt Paektu: Gender, Violence, Myth and Transformation in Korean Landscape,’ co-authored with Victoria Ten of Leiden University, will be published in July 2020 by Lexington. Robert is currently researching the fishing and animal/creaturely geographies in North Korea, colonial mineralogical and forest inheritances of the Korean peninsula and necro-mobilities of North Korean Ghost Ships and other difficult or unwelcome bodies and materials in Korean and East Asian historical geography.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you complete the form below to RSVP.