On December 5, 2025, the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) hosted a full-day international conference entitled Culture Wars in Taiwan: Languages, Literature, Identities, and the Politics of Memory. Also supported by the NTNU International Taiwan Studies Center, the conference brought together scholars from Taiwan, Japan, Europe, the United States, and Australia to examine how language, memory, media, and cultural politics shape contemporary debates over Taiwanese identity. Conducted entirely in English, the event reflected NTNU’s growing role as a hub for international Taiwan Studies and offered multidisciplinary perspectives across the humanities and social sciences.
The conference opened in the morning with welcoming remarks from Professor Yin C. Chuang (莊佳穎), Head of the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature at NTNU and an opening speech delivered by Professor Yao-Ting Sung (宋曜廷), Executive Vice President and Research Chair at NTNU, who emphasized the importance of humanities-based inquiry for understanding Taiwan’s linguistic diversity and contested historical narratives. Together, the opening speakers framed the workshop as an exploration of how “culture wars” in Taiwan are embedded in ongoing struggles over memory, language policy, and identity formation.
The keynote lecture, chaired by the distinguished literary scholar Professor Shih Shu-mei (史書美) of UCLA and NTNU, was delivered by the internationally renowned sociologist Professor Shunya Yoshimi (吉見俊哉), currently Professor in the Department of Tourism and Community Development at Kokugakuin University and former Vice President of The University of Tokyo. Entitled “Dialogue with AI Self: A Sociologist Starts to Fight Against AI Who/Which Claims Being Himself,” the keynote introduced an original experiment in which Professor Yoshimi engaged in sustained dialogue with an AI trained on his own scholarly writings. Through this encounter, Yoshimi reflected on questions of authorship, intellectual labor, and the limits of artificial intelligence as a medium for sociological and societal inquiry, arguing that critical confrontation with AI is essential for preserving human creativity and intellectual responsibility in an increasingly automated society. This introduction was followed by a lively Q&A.
After a short coffee break, the discussions turned to questions of historical memory and cultural representation. Chaired by Dr. Corrado Neri (柯漢東), Director of the CEFC Taipei, the first panel examined how colonial legacies and post-authoritarian memories continue to shape cultural politics in Taiwan and beyond. Professor Ann Heylen (賀安娟) addressed the Dutch colonial legacy in Taiwan and its reemergence in heritage branding and public memory, particularly in connection with the 400th anniversary of Tainan. Professor Yoshihisa Amae (天江喜久) explored Japanese colonial nostalgia in post–martial law Taiwan, suggesting that contemporary engagements with Japanese modernity function as a strategy for reimagining Taiwanese identity. The panel concluded with Professor Sergio Pérez Torres (裴紹武), who presented a comparative analysis of Taiwanese and Spanish cinema as sites of post-authoritarian memory-making. Each talk inspired rich discussion in the Q&A sessions, with conversations continuing beyond the scheduled time and into lunch.
Later in the day, attention shifted to language, linguistics, and policy. A second panel, chaired by Professor Wei-Cheng Sam Jheng (鄭偉成) of Fu Jen Catholic University, focused on the sociolinguistic realities of Taiwanese society. Professor Hui-lu Khoo (許慧如) offered a critical discussion of Taiwan’s “Bilingual Nation 2030” policy, highlighting its implications for local languages, mostly notably Taiwanese. Professor Seng-hian Lau (劉承賢) continued with an analysis of Taiwanese sentence-final particles honnh and hannh, proposing the concept of “sentence-words” to account for their distinctive syntactic and pragmatic properties. Professor Yu-ying Chuang (莊育穎) concluded the session with a corpus-based study of tonal neutralization in Taiwanese, demonstrating how prosodic boundaries and speaker variation shape tonal realization.
The final panel, chaired by Dr. Craig A. Smith (史峻) of the University of Melbourne, addressed questions of media, nationalism, and political behavior. Professor Huey-Rong Chen (陳慧蓉) examined contemporary Taiwanese television dramas, arguing that despite greater visibility of multilingualism, native-language characters are often denied narrative agency. Professor Yin C. Chuang traced changing Taiwanese perceptions of China across historical periods and within the contemporary landscape of popular culture and social media, while Dr. Sanho Chung (鍾燊豪) presented experimental research on voter tolerance for electoral clientelism at different levels of local elections.
The day concluded with closing remarks chaired by Professor Ann Heylen (賀安娟), with reflections delivered by Professor Tsong-han Lee (李宗翰), Vice Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at NTNU. Overall, the conference highlighted the central role of academic exchange in advancing international understanding of Taiwan’s cultural, linguistic, and intellectual landscapes. A banquet held in the evening provided further opportunities for informal exchange among participants, reinforcing the workshop’s collaborative and international spirit. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-border collaboration, the event contributed to ongoing efforts to strengthen global engagement with Taiwan Studies and to encourage future scholarly cooperation.
Written by Corrina Gross （高琳娜）