Professor Fan Yun - On Being an Academic, Activist, and Politician

This week, Morningside’s second Distinguished Visitor of the academic year, Prof. Fan Yun of National Taiwan University, shared her insights into Taiwanese politics, social movements, and NGO work with the college community. As an associate professor of sociology at NTU, Professor Fan has been persistent throughout her career in using her robust study of society to enable her own activism. Recently, Fan Yun boldly emerged in Taiwan’s political scene after cofounding the new Social Democratic Party, and making a strong showing in the national elections. On Wednesday, she gave a dinner talk entitled “Solidarity and Division on the Road of Rebuilding Communities: A Preliminary Study of Indigenous Self-Help Organizations after the Disaster", and on Thursday, she delivered a public lecture entitled “New Opportunities and New Challenges: Taiwanese Social Movements since 2008”. Fan Yun is highly enthusiastic about the political awakening of the younger generation of Taiwanese people, and she says that since 2008 the growth of civil society in Taiwan has provided the people with a new source of power in political and economic decison-making.