Event Highlights

How do you connect with people from different backgrounds? That’s a key challenge that international communities like NYU Shanghai face. It means learning alongside people from different cultures, and lived experiences. And it’s that mindset that’s at the heart of No Translation Needed, a year-long initiative launched by the Center for Student Belonging that creates space for students to connect across differences through conversation, art, and shared experiences.

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What does it mean to be a leader? A group of NYU Shanghai students is learning to lead through connecting and creating impact. The LEAD Program run by the Center for Student Belonging, fosters diversity, awareness, and action on campus. 

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Heading off to university can be a huge culture shock for anyone, but first-generation students, whose family members may not have attended university, face some special challenges. This semester, a student-run initiative under the Center for Student Belonging launched a mentorship program to build a needed community for these students at NYU Shanghai. 

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Work to live, or live to work? Fearful of being outcompeted and replaced, many of us find ourselves trapped in the grueling competition vying for higher status, higher income, more power, and better opportunities. How is the system of competition and self-exhaustion created and perpetuated? What role do we each play it in? While we young urbanites are exhausted by the ever-growing competition and stress, however, the situation facing the manual laborers is far more dire. For workers from different industries and social classes, what labor injustices do they face?

Through interactive activities, a student-led dialogue, and a talk about the marginalized voices of workers from Foxconn, the “WeWoked” event series challenged the participants to confront the social issues around competition, stress, labor, and exploitation.

A popular Chinese actress was accused of abandoning two surrogate babies born in the U.S.. Fierce response from the Chinese public has followed. What are the ethical and legal issues raised by the application of assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy and egg-freezing? How do arguments about reproductive autonomy, women's rights, exploitation come into play? We invited three panelists to discuss surrogacy, egg-freezing and egg-donation from philosophical, sociological and legal perspectives.

The panel discussion, “Xenophobia in the Time of Coronavirus: Culture, Race & Stigma,” were joined by three panelists: Joanna Waley-Cohen, Provost of NYU Shanghai and Professor of History; Lin Yao, Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School, public intellectual and activist; and Qiu Yu, lecturer in Social Anthropology at Minzu University of China. The panelists discussed the social, political and historical contexts in which China’s citizens, members of its diaspora and people of Asian descent have been stigmatized as carriers of contagion in the time of COVID-19. Looking at both history and the current phenomenon, the panelists examined narratives that link the imagining of an infectious disease with the imagining of “the other.” In addition, the panelists commented on the recent reports of xenophobic incidents targeting African nationals in China, highlighting the historical and psychological roots of racial prejudice.

Who’s Afraid of Feminism” is an earnest and thought-provoking discussion on feminism across generations and societies. The panel presented diverse views on heated topics, from the gendered division of labor at home, to women in workplaces, from the history of feminist movement in the West to feminist activism in today’s China.