The Sunflower Movement: Taiwan’s student-led insurrection?
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:30 pm to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery, SOAS University of London
- Room
- BGLT
- Event type
- Lecture
About this event
This talk examines how the Taiwanese occupiers translated the concept of civil disobedience to practice and what democratic theorists can learn from the Taiwanese case.
Critics have compared the 2014 Sunflower occupation of Taiwan’s parliament to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by insurrectionists seeking to overturn the results of a democratic election.
But whereas what occurred on January 6 was a violent assault on liberal democratic institutions, the Sunflower Movement engaged in civil disobedience as a nonviolent practice that complements the routine political process in a democratic society.
Schedule
This event is part of the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies event series series on 8 May.
- 10:00am - 12:00pm - Room BGLT, Documentary Screening 1: The Edge of Night 《街頭》by Chiang Wei-Hua
- 1:00pm - 2:50pm - Room BGLT, Documentary Screening 2: The Right Thing 《廣場》by Chiang Wei-Hua
- 3:30pm - 5:00pm - Room BGLT, Public Lecture by Dr Leon Kunz: The Sunflower Movement: Taiwan's student-led insurrection?
All SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies events are open to public and no need to register.
Meet the speaker
Dr Leon N. Kunz
Leon N. Kunz is affiliated with the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, where he helped build a new Center for Taiwan Studies as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
His PhD thesis, completed at SOAS University of London, explored how participants in Taiwan’s Sunflower and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movements conceived and practised democracy in order to reflect on broader questions of strategy, prefiguration, and deliberation.
His research on the two movements was supported by SOAS, the CCKF, and the CCS of Taiwan’s National Central Library. Leon’s wider research interests include deliberative democracy, the politics of memory, queer politics, and East Asian international relations.
