Lunch Forum

We would like to invite everyone who is interested to the East Asian Studies Lunch Forum during the winter semester 2026/27.

The Lunch Forum will be held in hybrid form on Wednesdays from 12 to 1 pm (sharp). The lectures will take place on the campus of the Ruhr-University in building MB room 3/126 and will also be broadcast via Zoom. To receive a notification with the Zoom access link, please send a short email with the subject 'Anmeldung zum Mittagsforum', the text 'Teilnahme' and your name to ostasienwissenschaftliches-mittagsforum@ruhr-uni-bochum.de. As usual, food and drinks are allowed due to the lunch time.

Join Zoom-Meeting:
https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/67630459242?pwd=I78Oj12RQ7VI6DyjbHyWTxD7dF7EXW.1

Meeting-ID: 676 3045 9242
Passwort: 683146

Lunch Forum programme

11. November

Bohyun Kim (CEAC, Bochum): Decentering EU Climate Leadership: Strategic Followship Agency in the South Korean Green Transition

Abstract

This presentation explores the European Union (EU)’s climate leadership through the often-overlooked perspective of the "follower". While the EU seeks to project its climate standards globally through initiatives like the European Green Deal, this dissertation argues that current understandings of global climate governance remain speculative and Eurocentric without empirical analysis from the follower's point of view. True leadership is not an inherent quality; it is a relational status that followers must grant, validate, and practice. To address this gap, the research introduces the Strategic Climate Followership Agency (SCFA). This framework shifts the analytical focus to how follower nations, specifically South Korea, a technological middle power, strategically adapt EU environmental norms to suit their own developmental and industrial interests. The presentation will unpack three key stages of research findings:

• Provincializing EU Climate Governance: It integrates EU studies and comparative regionalism to frame the EU as just one regional manifestation of climate governance.
• Green Taxonomy Policymaking: It demonstrates how South Korean institutional actors selectively localized EU taxonomy norms to legitimize domestic energy preferences, resulting in an 'anti-normative’ effect.
• Hydrogen Policy Trajectories: A peer comparison reveals how the EU’s regulatory governance and South Korea’s developmental state model create divergent green transition paths.

The research demonstrates that the EU's normative influence relies heavily on the strategic requirements of followership. The future of global climate governance depends on the sophisticated co-production of green norms between peer actors who recognize that strategic followership is essential to independent choice and international status.

25. November

Elke Spielmanns-Rome (Internationalisierung & Qualitätsmanagement in Forschung & Lehre, Bonn): YuXplorer — Chinesische Phraseologismen strukturiert erfassen, vernetzen und analysieren. Ein multilinguales datenbankbasiertes Werkzeug für 歇后语, 成语 und 惯用语

02. Dezember

Sunghye Hwang (Religionen Ostasiens, Bochum): Textual Problems of the Kŏnna p’yoha ilsŭng suhaengja pimil’ŭigi (Notes on the Secret Meaning for Those Who Practice the One Vehicle of the Gaṇḍavyūha)

16. Dezember

Henrike Rudolph (Sinologie, Göttingen): tba

13. Januar

Eiichi Kido (Geschichte/Politikwissenschaften, Osaka): Wird das Pazifismusgebot Japans bald zur Makulatur?

20. Januar

Susanne Reichert (Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie, Bonn): Produktion und Repräsentation zur Zeit Ögedei Khans: Ein Werkplatz des 13. Jahrhunderts im mongolischen Orkhontal

03. Februar

Johanna E.E. Lander (Koreanistik, Tübingen): From Democracy Promotion to Democratic Maintenance? A Comparative Study of German Political Foundations in South Korea, 2010–2024