Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Areas of Interest
- Transpacific Studies
- Postwar Okinawa History
- Critical Infrastructure Studies
- Critical Militarization Studies
Working Dissertation
Title
Supervisors
Description
My dissertation project uses the U.S. and Japanese governance of Okinawa’s built environment to consider the questions of transpacific militarism, racism, and settler colonialism. It deploys the notion of “counter-sovereign urbanism” to examine how, regardless of the effects of the U.S.- and Japanese-sponsored urban initiatives in Okinawa, the violence enacted by U.S. military dispossession and land expropriation remained unaddressed. “Countersoverignty,” in historian Manu Karuka’s formulation, is the reactionary sovereign claims that the U.S. empire made to disavow the existing Indigenous land claims and rights to self-determination in continental America. Extending Karuka’s analysis to the case of Okinawa, and further drawing on the methodological insights of transpacific studies and critical infrastructure studies, my project asks: How can we understand the U.S. and Japanese governments’ “reactionary” endeavors to sustain their sovereign claims over Okinawa through the production of urban subjectivities and the remaking of Okinawa’s built environments and infrastructures? In what ways can these urban interventions shed light on the reproduction of colonial power relations in Okinawa from the U.S. Occupation period to the post-reversion era? My dissertation project aims to contribute to the historical analysis of Okinawa’s postwar experiences by examining how various actors—including local residents, government officials, urban planners, builders, and U.S. Army engineer officers—shaped and contested the conditions of urban living in militarized environments in both contradictory and at times complementary ways.
Biography
Sabrina Teng-io Chung is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University (2017) and B.A. in English from National Chengchi University (2012). Her Ph.D. dissertation examines the U.S. and Japanese colonial governance of Okinawa’s built environment and the spatial logic of militarism and urbanism such governmental practices and technologies orchestrated. Her research interests include transpacific studies, postwar Okinawa studies, critical infrastructure studies, and critical militarization studies. Her publication has appeared in Society and Space (online edition). She translated investigative reporting articles from independent Chinese-language news outlets including The Reporter and Initium Media. She also co-founded the “Thinking Infrastructures in Global Asia: New Perspectives and Approaches” working group, which was supported by the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research has been supported by the MOFA Taiwan Fellowship and Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship, among others.
Presentations
- “Contested Circulations: The Counter-sovereign Politics of Urban Master
Planning in 1960s U.S.-Occupied Okinawa.” 2024 AAS-in-Asia Conference, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, July 9, 2024.
- “From Housing Construction to Permanent Base Installation: The Case of the ‘Levittown on the Pacific.’” Graduate Fellowship Symposium, School of Cities, University of Toronto, April 19, 2023.
- “Transnational Asian/American Critique and the Recent Historiography of Cold War Militarization in Taiwan.” 2023 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies, Long Beach, CA, USA, April 8, 2023.
- “The Infrastructural Temporality of Military Construction in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa.” Center for the Study of the United States Graduate Workshop, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, March 9, 2023.
- “Pacific Islanders Seen and Unseen: The Construction of Asian/American Victimized Subjectivity Under COVID-19” [不／可視之太平洋島民：從 COVID-19 下亞／美受害主體建構談起]. 2021 Annual Conference of the Association for Taiwan Social Studies, October 31, 2021 (virtual, in Mandarin Chinese).
- “Remembering/Forgetting Taiwan’s Cold War Media Infrastructures: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Daughter of the Nile and Its Digital Afterlives.” 2020 Annual Conference of the North American Taiwan Studies Association, May 20, 2021 (virtual).
Publications
- Chung, Sabrina Teng-io. “Infrastructures Beyond Repair: Fukushima’s Treated Water and Decolonial Futurities.” In “Investigating Infrastructures III,” edited by Deborah Cowen, Society and Space, December 12, 2022.
- Chung, Sabrina Teng-io. “Mediating Japan’s Southern Advance: An Interview with Seiji Shirane.” The Taiwan Gazette. February 25, 2023.
- Chung, Sabrina Teng-io, Yu-Han Huang, and Sida Liu. “The Law and Politics of Taiwan’s Transitional Justice: An Interview with Cheng-Yi Huang” [轉型正義為法律與政治的辯證：專訪黃丞儀]. The Taiwan Gazette. January 6, 2022. (in Chinese).
- Chung, Sabrina Teng-io. “On War and Love during COVID-19: An Interview with Chien-ting Lin.” The Taiwan Gazette. March 25, 2021.
- Tsao, Fu-nien. “Be Water, Hong Kong: The Birth of the First Diasporic Hongkonger Magazine in Taiwan.” [痛苦與希望的共同體──首本離散港人雜誌《如水》在台誕生]. Translated by Quinton Huang and Sabrina Teng-io Chung. The Reporter. February 4, 2021.
Curatorial Projects
Convenor of an art and scholarly dialogue series that involved a book display, art exhibition, photobook workshop, artist talk, book launch, and graduate workshop featuring artists Kaori Nakasone and Satoko Nema and scholars Professor Mayumo Inoue and Professor Wendy Matsumura. The series was co-organized by the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group, “Thinking Infrastructures in Global Asia: New Perspectives and Approaches,” Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library, and Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, March 25 to April 26, 2024.
- 2022 “Encountering Everyday Life: Taiwan in Museums.” Co-convenor who oversaw the translation of articles featuring the museum collection of the National Museum of Taiwan History and in-depth interviews with Dr. Lung-chih Chang, the museum director, and Dr. Shuo-bin Su, Director of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. The series was sponsored by the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, Winter 2022.
- 2021 “Lusheng in Taiwan: Contradictions and Anticipations.” Co-convenor who oversaw the translation of articles focusing on the racialized treatment of mainland Chinese students (lushing) in Taiwan, conducted an in-depth interview with Professor Chien-ting Lin on the issue, and co-organized a film screening of Our Youth in Taiwan (dir. Fu Yue), featuring Professor Michelle Cho as the discussant. The series was sponsored by the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, Winter 2021.
Awards
- 2024 Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship, Japan Foundation (Japan)
- 2024 MOFA Taiwan Fellowship, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan)
- 2024 Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia-Pacific Studies, Munk School of Global
Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto
- 2024 SGS Sponsorship Fund, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto
- 2024 School of Cities Small Grants Program, School of Cities, University of Toronto
- 2023 Academic Achievement Award, Department of East Asian Studies, University of
Toronto
- 2023 Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge, Asian Institute, Munk
School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
- 2022 Graduate Research Grant for the Study of the United States, Center for the
Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy,
University of Toronto
- 2022 Urban Graduate Student Fellowship, School of Cities, University of Toronto
- 2019 Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan Research Grant, Global Taiwan
Studies Initiative, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto