WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

How do global connections persist when borders harden, through war, empire, and coercive social orders? This panel explores being global after globalization by examining three kinds of circulation that thrive under constraint: information, gendered labor, and cultural narrative. Emma Allen analyzes Operation Mincemeat (1943) to show how wartime intelligence moved through indirect channels - neutral Spain, bureaucratic documents, and carefully staged credibility - demonstrating the strategic power and moral ambiguity of misinformation. Sarah Bryant Genung argues that patriarchy is a historically constructed system sustained through coercion and control of women’s labor, comparing the formalization of gender hierarchy during Romanization in Western Europe with the World War II Japanese comfort women system as state-organized exploitation. Daniel Mayfield traces the Japanese biwa as a portable medium of storytelling and memory, charting its post–World War II decline and its modern revival through adaptation and cross-genre exchange. Dylan Deman's paper on Japanese survivor testimony grounds the panel in the lived experience of wartime devastation and its difficult survival, showing how ordinary Japanese people narrated the experience of destruction and loss. Together, these papers reveal a shared dynamic: when borders close, networks do not disappear; they reroute through shadow systems, coerced dependencies, and resilient cultural forms that sustain connection across time and space.