By Beryl Yang
On Saturday, May 10, the EWCA Hawaii Chapter sponsored a celebration of East-West Center Day at Hale Halawai. Following opening remarks by special guest speaker Raymond Burghardt, the Hawaii Chapter announced five student recipients of the EWCA 2008 Summer Travel Grant: Thuy La (Vietnam), Maria Chelo Manlagnit (Philippines), Carl Polley (USA), Turro Wongkaren (Indonesia) and Stuart Candy (Australia).

Stuart Candy, a PhD candidate in Political Science will travel to English to present at the New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living Conference to be held at Lancaster University. His paper is entitled “Found Futures: Communicating Foresight Through Public Art and Design.”

Thuy La, a PhD candidate in Education Administration, will present a paper at the 32nd Pacific Circle Consortium at the National University of Samoa in Samoa. The title of her paper is “Factors influencing educational and career choices of Vietnamese senior high school students.”

Maria Chelo Manlagnit, a PhD candidate in Economics, will present a paper at the Fifth North American Productivity Workshop, held at the Stern School of Business of New York University in New York. The title of her paper is “Cost Efficiency, Determinants and Risk Preferences in Banking: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis.”

Carl Polley, a PhD candidate in Linguistics, will travel to Korea to present two papers: one at the 18th International Congress of Linguistics, held at Korea University, and another at the 6th International Conference of Cognitive Science at Yonsei University. The titles of his two papers are “Unaccusativity and Unergativity in Mandarin Stative Verbs: Argument Structure Under Resultative Serial Verb $P-Conjunction” and “Tracking Glances to Simulated Distracters During Language Comprehension.”

Turro Wongkaren, a PhD candidate in Sociology, will present a paper at the ASA Collective Behavior and Social Movements meeting in Boston. The title of his paper is “Institutionalization of Social Movement with Walhi as an Example.”

Update: Ambassador Ray Burghardt told the group that in his three years at the Center, he had come to appreciate the “grass roots” nature of the Center’s work, which makes the EWC unique among organizations working in the Asia Pacific region. Our vast network of contacts and friends is constantly being developed by the Education Program with our students, the Research Program in its collaboration with universities and institutes throughout the region, and the Seminar Program with media, NGO’s and governments. Our participants in turn help to design and carry out our programs, frequently providing crucial local support. One very important result of this grass roots character is the Center’s wonderful alumni network, which also is unique among American non-profits working in the Asia Pacific region. Ray recalled his warm meeting last month with alumni in Kyoto and discussed some of the plans for the Golden Anniversary next year.