Dr. Xinmin Liu, associate professor, participates in WSU 2019 Academic Showcase

On Mar. 28, Dr. Xinmin Liu, associate professor of Chinese and comparative cultural studies, will present his ideas on human-land relationships for the second consecutive year at the WSU Academic Showcase. 

Xinmin will discuss the traditional Chinese ethic Rendi qihe (human-land affinity) in relation to how humans can interact and habitat non-human life in harmony, he said in his abstract.

“This has all to do with the climate change and global warming,” Xinmin said.

People have tried to understand the non-human physical surroundings by it’s predictability and regularity. However, nature is chaotic, irregular, and unpredictable, Xinmin said.

In Xinmin’s presentation, he will explain the cognitive affect that humans need to restore in order to have a more harmonious relationship with the land. Humans need to go through embodied cognition and embedded perception to understand nature, he said.

In embodied cognition, one must rely on the visceral senses to perceive the world. In embedded perception, one must put your physical self in the nature, he said.

Xinmin has studied how humans try to refashion nature since graduate school. Mainly he has focused on the Chinese garden, which is a cultural concept on how humans try to remap and refashion the land, he said.

“Most of our urban centers [and] cities are designed in abstract. They don’t get any direct visceral exposure to the surroundings. It’s even worse in China,” Xinmin said.

In China, people don’t go to the place they are going to create a building, he said. His presentation critiques the notion that people can sell land resources and consume them regardless of the ecological perils, he said in his abstract.

Xinmin‘s presentation can be viewed by the public between 9 a.m. to noon on Mar. 28 in M.G. Carey Senior Ballroom in the CUB.