Time is money plackard

Life as “humineral”? What is behind China’s high-tech boom?

In early 2023, the term “human mine” or “huminerals” (renkuang 人矿) has sparked a widespread discussion on the Chinese Internet (China Digital Times, 2023). The term first appeared in 1984 in the People’s Daily to describe Chinese workers as a kind of material resource for economic development. Forty years later, young talents in the high-tech industry have used the term to criticise how their lives are used as “consumables” and exploited continuously. What is the underlying logic behind the sudden popularity of the term? How do young talents in urban China experience their work and life?

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Consuming Asia Conference

CfP: Consuming Asia

The Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), the Network for Asian Studies (Asianettverket), the University of Bergen, and the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) are co-hosting the 2023 Nordic NIAS Council (NNC) / ASIANET Conference: “Consuming Asia – Systems and Structures of Consumption in Modern and Contemporary Asia” on 22-23 June 2023. The conference will be preceeded by a a PhD workshop.

We are now calling for papers for the conference.

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Next events

All events
Mar
28

Auditing Halal and Standardising Halal Expertise in Indonesia and Malaysia

14:00
Guest lecture
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Mar
29

Strange bedfellows or genuine comrades? Variation in digital solidarity among Myanmar’s revolutionaries

12:30 to 13:30
NIAS Lunch Talk
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Mar
29

Exceptional, Pragmatic and Provisional: Formation of British Imperial Governance in Asian Frontier Tracts

13:15 to 14:30
Seminar
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Apr
4

Chinese Companies Abroad and the Host Country’s Laws: The Case of Dirty Industries in Serbia

13:00 to 14:30
Online Seminar
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About AsiaPortal

The AsiaPortal was established in 2006 by the Library and Information Center of NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS LINC) as a common Nordic resource for academic information on Asia and as a platform for information sharing within the Nordic Asian studies community. The content on the portal is provided by NIAS Library, the Nordic NIAS Council (NNC) member institutions […]

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InFocus blog

In Focus is a forum for discussions on up-to-date topics in Asia featured in the Asia Portal’s In Focus section. We welcome well-written contributions from MA and PhD students, researchers and other experts on Asian subjects.

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Shodganga

E-resource of the month

(Freely available)

“Shodhganga” is a digital repository of Indian electronic theses and dissertations containing over 400.000 theses .

Submission of an electronic version of PhD theses and dissertations by researchers in Indian universities is mandated since 2016 in order to facilitate open access to Indian theses and dissertations to the academic community world-wide.

The word “Shodh” originates from Sanskrit and stands for research and discovery and “Ganga” is the holiest, largest and longest of all rivers in Indian subcontinent. Shodhganga repository is hosted and maintained by the INFLIBNET Centre.

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Recent Nordic Asia Podcasts

All podcasts
17. Mar 2023 / 28 min

Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation Among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon

A conversation with Judith Beyer. Hosted by Mai Van Tran

Where does the concept of “community” come from? How does it shape the lives of Hindus and Muslims in metropolitan Yangon? And how do these people navigate between their ethno-religious and other cosmopolitan identities? In this episode, Prof. Judith Beyer, a Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz, joins Dr. Mai Van […]

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10. Mar 2023 / 28 min

Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life

A conversation with Arve Hansen and Manisha Anantharaman. Hosted by Kenneth Bo Nielsen.

In this episode, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Springer, 2022). In this book, Hansen studies the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, focusing on how everyday life changes in the context of rapid economic development and capitalist transformations. How does […]

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A Nordic Hub for Asian Studies

NIAS - the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies - is an academically independent Nordic research and resource center, focusing on modern Asia from a predominantly social sciences perspective. NIAS is an integrated part of the University of Copenhagen with the status of a centre under the Department of Political Science.
NNC- the Nordic NIAS Council is a body that actively works to support and strengthen Asian studies in the Nordic region and presently consists of 23 Nordic universities and research institutions in all five Nordic countries. The aims of the NNC are to further Nordic Asian studies by pooling resources and establishing mutual cooperation in developing research, as well as the organization of conferences, seminars and Asia-related educational programmes in the Nordic region. In particular, it works to promote synergy between the activities at the NNC member institutions and NIAS.

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Finland

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Iceland

Norway

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Sweden

Open notebooks

Special Collections

The AsiaPortal’s Special Collections is an assemblage of information on physical or digital special collections at libraries in the Nordic Countries affiliated with the NNC.Under each country, you can find a description of the collection and, if available, direct links to various materials such as catalogs, manuscripts, and image collections as well as contact information […]

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Taiwan Reseource Center for Chinese Studies (TRCCS) logo

Taiwan Resource Center for Chinese Studies (TRCCS)

On 16 may 2018 the Taiwan Resource Center for Chinese Studies (TRCCS) was officially inaugurated at the TORS Center of Knowledge at the Southern Campus of the University of Copenhagen. TRCCS is the result of a cooperation agreement between the National Central Library of Taiwan (NCL) on the one hand and Department of Cross-cultural and […]

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Bambu

The Nordic Asia Podcast

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a podcast series in which experts share their insights about timely topics within Asian Studies. The series is co-hosted by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) and its partner institutions: the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

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