Tibet Center

Public Talk with Arthur Holcombe, Founder The Poverty Alleviation Fund

The Tibet Center at UVa invites you attend a public talk entitled “China’s Approaches to Poverty Reduction–Role of The Poverty Fund in Tibetan Townships” by Arthur Holcombe the founder of the Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund (Now The Poverty Alleviation Fund).

Monday, April 4, 2011
3:00 – 4:00pm, NAU Hall, Room 342

Arthur Holcombe was Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme and Resident Coordinator of UN Operational Activities in China during 1992-1998, and during this period was also accredited to the People’s Republic of China as the UN Resident Coordinator and representative of the UN Secretary General. During 1992-1998, Mr. Holcombe initiated many programs and workshops to promote poverty reduction, employment, environmental protection, improved basic health and education and increased HIV/AIDS awareness.

Prior to 1992, Arthur Holcombe served in many postings with UNDP, including as Deputy and Acting Resident Representative in Afghanistan (1975-79); as Deputy Resident Representative in Pakistan (1979); as Resident Representative of UNDP in the South Pacific based in Fiji (1980-1984); and as Resident Representative in the Sudan (1984-1985). During 1989-91 he was Deputy Director of the Regional Bureau for Asia and Pacific of UNDP at its headquarters in New York.

In 1998 Arthur Holcombe established the Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund to promote Tibetan livelihoods and well being in rural areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Main project activities included employable skills training, township and village enterprise development, rural micro credit, milk production and dairy development in rural Nomad areas and Tibetan artisan products development and sales.

Since 2000, Dr. Holcombe has also given lectures on various development and aid strategy topics at the Brandeis University Heller School of Social Policy and at Beijing Normal University.

Arthur Holcombe has an A.B. from Harvard College (Government), an M.P.I.A. from the University of Pittsburgh (Economic and Social Development) and a Ph. D. from New York University (Economics).

– UVA Campus: Nau Hall 342 at 3-4pm on Monday, April 4, 2011

Public Talk with Visiting Fellows: Tashi Phuntsok & Drolma Kyab

The Tibet Center at UVa and the Curry School of Education co-sponsored Education to Employment Program (E2E) invites you to the next set of lectures in the brown bag lunch seminar series.  Visiting fellows Tashi Phunstok and Drolma Kyab will share about their current work and their future aspirations, as well as take questions from the audience.   Bring your lunch, and enjoy the next talks in this important series.

Tashi Phuntsok
Founder, Travel Wild Tibet

Monday, March 21
12:00 – 12:45pm, Ruffner Hall (Curry School), Room G004B

Tashi Phuntsok is the founder of TRAVEL WILD TIBET travel company that mostly specializes all kind of tours throughout Amdo and Kham regions of Tibet. He is also an intellectual with a passion for Tibetan life and culture, he is well versed in  the history of the Tibetan plateau, Tibetan musical traditions, and the ancient and modern culture of all Tibetan regions.  In addition, he is an experienced photographer and videographer, and has documented the daily life of Tibetans as well as remote landscapes on video and film.  He has worked as a travel agent, tour guide, and agency manager since 1999.  He has organized and guided the trips of researchers, filmmakers, photographers, explorers and backpackers throughout the Tibetan world.

Drolma Kyab
Tibet Namchen Travel Agency

Monday, March 21
1:00-1:45pm, Ruffner Hall (Curry School), Room G004B

Drolma Kyab exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit. After starting his career as a rickshaw driver in Lhasa, Drolma Kyab worked his way up in travel companies for eight years before striking out on his own and establishing the Tibet Namchen Travel Agency and Hotel Services Company.  Tibet Namchen has been operating for the last six years and employs over twenty people. Drolma Kyab is committed to the advancement and enrichment of his staff and other Tibetans interested in tourism–the largest industry in Tibetan areas of China. This commitment to creating training opportunities for local Tibetans to improve their competitiveness in the tourism industry in central Tibet made Drolma Kyab an excellent choice for the TEEI fellowship program. Through the TEEI fellowship Drolma Kyab would like to connect with institutions and organizations that can help him to create a curriculum centered on practical skills development for Tibetans interested in entering the tourism industry or for those already in the field who seek to advance their careers.

Challenging the Territorial Trap: The Sovereign Articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, A Seminar with Dr. Fiona McConnell

Dr. McConnell’s interests lie in the everyday construction of statehood and sovereignty in cases of tenuous territoriality, and intersect with scholarship in political geography, development studies, critical international relations and political anthropology. Located within and between theories of sovereignty, statehood and territory, and issues of transnationalism, diaspora and refugeehood, the focus of her doctoral research was on exile politics and the Tibetan community in India. Her current work extends this research and focuses on issues of the diplomatic practices of unrecognised states, geographies of peace and sovereign futures.

Fiona McConnell is currently an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at  Newcastle University.

Nau Hall, Room 342, 5:00-6:30pm

Sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies

The UVa Digital Humanities Series,
Participatory Filmmaking: A Two-Part Event: Presentation & Screening

The UVa Digital Humanities Spring 2011 Speaker Series
Presents A Two-Part Event:
Presentation: 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Screening: 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

SHANTI, the Scholars’ Lab, and IATH are pleased to announce that they will be co-sponsoring a two-part event on Thursday, March 17, 2011, featuring three prominent filmmakers working in China and Africa, amongst other places, Nelson Walker (Kham Film Project), Lynn True (a New York-based filmmaker and editor), Tsering Perlo (founder of Rabsal), who will offer a presentation on the power of participatory filmmaking and a screening of their current, highly-acclaimed film project, Summer Pasture.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Presentation:
“Participatory Filmmaking as a Means of Social Transformation”
3:30pm, Minor Hall Auditorium

A reception will follow immediately afterward.

Screening:
Summer Pasture
7:00pm, Clark Hall 108 (Auditorium)

Summer Pasture is a moving documentary that follows a nomadic Tibetan family over the course of a summer who are faced with a changing world that is threatening their culture and very way of life. It offers a unique perspective into the lives and traditions of the nomadic Tibetan people and their struggle for survival.

To read more about Nelson Walker, Lynn True, Tsering Perlo and their projects, click here. For more information about Summer Pasture and the Kham Film Project, click here.

These events are co-sponsored by:

• SHANTI
• Scholars’ Lab
• IATH

Politics of Tibet Policy

Institutional Politics and the Politics of Policy

An interdisciplinary exploration of the question of Tibet in the context of institutional politics and the politics of policy change in the PRC

• Pitman Potter, Professor of Law and Hong Kong Bank Chair in Asian Research, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia
• Tsering Shakya, Canadian Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia, University of British Columbia
• Dibyesh Anand, Associate Professor, Department of Politics, University of Westminster, London
• Tseten Wangchuk, Discussant, Senior Fellow, UVa Tibet Center

Friday, March 18, 2011 Nau Hall Auditorium 3 – 5pm

Cosponsored by the East Asia Center, and the Center for South Asian Studies.

For more information, contact tr8n@virginia.edu

Public Talk With Visiting Fellows: Lhamo Deva and Tashi Tsering

E2E Invites you to attend: Tuesday, March 1 – Nau Hall 342

The Tibet Center at UVa and the Curry School of Education co-sponsored Education to Employment Initiative invites you to hear two speakers as part of our brown bag lunch seminar series.  Visiting fellows Lhamo Deva and Tashi Tsering will share about their current work and their future aspirations, as well as take questions from the audience.  Bring your lunch, and enjoy hearing from two participants in this important program.

Lhamo Deva: 11:30am – 12:15pm
Operations Manager, Winrock International

Tashi Tsering: 12:30pm – 1:15pm
Eastern Tibet Training Institute

Lhamo Deva has been the central Tibetan in Winrock International as its operations manager.

Winrock International is one of two primary recipients of USAID funding for work with Tibetan communities, and at present is of the main international NGOs working with Tibetans in China on a full spectrum of activities. Its three main areas are livelihoods, cultural preservation, and environmental conservation. As the operations manager in the home office in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Lhamodeva plays a key role in all aspects of the work across all three areas and has a broad understanding of the work of Winrock and its diverse partners.

In her talk, Lhamo will introduce one of Winrock’s current projects in Kham and Amdo under the TSERING project.

Tashi Tsering
Eastern Tibet Training Institute

Tuesday, March 1
12:30-1:15pm, Nau Hall 342

Tashi Tsering is a new member of Eastern Tibet Training Institute (www.etti.org). ETTI was founded in 2004 as a not-for-profit community school working to improve the livelihoods of remote communities in China’s southwest through training-based poverty alleviation programs. ETTI’s flagship program is the Youth Pre-Employment Training Program. This program is designed to help unemployed rural youth find their first job. Participants receive training in languages, computer literacy, basic accounting, customer service and life skills. It also includes an on-the-job training component delivered in partnership with local enterprise. ETTI is located in Shangri-la, formerly Zhongdian, in Yunnan province. To date, more than 200 young people have graduated from the Youth Pre-Employment Training Program, with more than 90 per cent securing jobs before or soon after graduating. Graduates have found jobs in a variety of local enterprises. Some graduates have gone on to develop small businesses and tourism-related projects in their home villages.
Another part of Tsering’s work is a tourism company that he started with two other Tibetans in Beijing, China.  High-end tourism is a growing area of China’s economy, but there was a lack of tour guides able to meet the growing demand. Tsering came up with the idea to train some Tibetans as high-end tour guides on the platform of ETTI.

• location: <strong>UVa Directions/Map to:</strong> <a onclick="detailRight('http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/popPages/201-NauHall.html','pop',675,550)" href="http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html" target="_blank">Nau Hall - New South Lawn Building</a>

Seminar on Environmental Liability Insurance in the Tibetan Region: An Assessment of Needs

Professor Chen Xufeng (Dechen)

On Monday, February 7th the University of Virginia Tibet Center hosts Visiting Scholar Chen Xufeng (Dechen) for a discussion of her research at the intersection of insurance law and the environment in China.

Chen Xufeng (Dechen) is an Associate Professor of Law at Minzu University in Beijing. Her research focuses on insurance law and environmental legal issues. Professor Chen has been a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia Tibet Center from 2010-11.

– UVA Campus: Nau Hall 342 at 5-6pm on Monday, February 7, 2011

• location: Nau Hall, Room 342

A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India

A Public Talk by Bruce Rich

The University of Virginia Tibet Center, the Center for South Asian Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies co-host author Bruce Rich for a discussion of his book “To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India”.

In 1991, Bruce Rich traveled to Orissa and gazed upon the rock edicts erected by the Indian emperor Ashoka over 2,200 years ago. Intrigued by the stone inscriptions that declared religious tolerance, conservation, nonviolence, species protection, and human rights, Rich was drawn into Ashoka’s world. Ashoka was a conqueror who converted to Buddhism on the heels of a bloody war, yet his empire rested on a political system that prioritized material wealth and amoral realpolitik. This system had been perfected by Kautilya, a statesman who wrote the world’s first treatise on economics. In this powerful critique of the current wave of globalization, Rich urgently calls for a new global ethic, distilling the timely messages of Ashoka and Kautilya while reflecting on thinkers from across the ages—from Aristotle and Adam Smith to George Soros.

About the Speaker: Bruce Rich is a Washington, DC-based attorney who has served as senior counsel on international finance and development issues for major environmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Rich has published extensively in environmental and policy journals, as well as in newspapers and magazines such as The Financial Times, The Nation and The Ecologist. He is the author of “Mortgaging the Earth”, a widely acclaimed critique of the World Bank and reflection on the philosophical and historical evolution of the project of economic development in the West. He has been awarded the United Nations Environment Program ‘Global 500 Award,’ the highest environmental prize of the United Nations, in 1988, and also won the World Hunger Media Award in that year for the best periodical piece on development issues.

– UVA Campus: Gibson Hall, Room 211

• location: <strong>Directions & Map:</strong> <a onclick="detailRight('http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/popPages/200-GibsonHall.html','pop',675,550)" href="http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html" target="_blank">UVa Campus, Gibson Hall Auditorium</a>

Jesuit on the Roof of the World, Fr. Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Tibet

Trent Pomplun, Associate Professor of Theology University of Loyola-Maryland

The St. Anselm Institute begins its 10th Annual Public Lecture Series at the University of Virginia on Thursday October 7th. We happily welcome back Trent Pomplun, Loyola University-Maryland Associate Professor of Theology. Professor Pomplun is a UVA alumnus, where he received his doctorate from the Department of Religious Studies.

Trent Pomplun is the author of numerous scholarly articles, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism (Basil Blackwell), and the author of the recent and widely acclaimed Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission in Tibet (Oxford).

Prof. Pomplun’s 7:00pm talk on October 7 will focus on the fascinating trials and adventures of Ippolito Desideri, the Jesuit missionary priest who circumnavigated the globe and several cultures during his time in Tibet from 1715 to 1721.

The University of Virginia Tibet Center and the Department of Religious Studies are cosponsors of this public lecture. All are invited and welcomed to attend.

• location: <strong>Directions & Map:</strong> <a onclick="detailRight('http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/popPages/60-MinorHall.html','pop',675,550)" href="http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html" target="_blank">UVa Campus, Minor Hall Auditoreum</a>

Can a Buddhist Be a Skeptic?

George Dreyfus, Jackson Professor of Religion, Williams College

In this talk, George Dreyfus will examine the nature of Madhyamaka arguments and the range of their interpretations within the Tibetan tradition by focusing on a particular author, Patsab Nyimadrak, an important Tibetan thinker from the eleventh century. The talk will shed light on these works from a historical perspective and reveal the pivotal role that Patsab Nyimadrak played in the transmission of Indian Buddhism to Tibet. Further exploration of these writings within the Tibetan philosophical tradition will confirm his originality as a unique example of thorough skepticism within this tradition. This event will conclude by reflecting on the nature of skepticism and the role that it can play within a Western appropriation of Buddhism.

Sponsored by the East Asia Center at the University of Virginia / Co-Sponsored by The Tibet Center

• location: <strong>Directions & Map:</strong> <a onclick="detailRight('http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/popPages/101-WilsonHall.html','pop',675,550)" href="http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html" target="_blank">UVa Campus, Wilson Hall: Room 301</a>