The Obituary for Dr. Fang-Tzu Hsu

Dear Members of the Paulo Freire Institute and GSEIS,

It is with extreme sadness that I inform the learning communities of GSEIS of the passing of our alumna and my advisee, Dr. Fang-Tzu Hsu. Graduating in 2015, Dr. Hsu returned to Taiwan and married her fiancé, Huan -Tang Huang. She fell ill in 2017, and passed away this Sunday, September 23, 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan, her hometown.

Fang-Tzu Hsu’s doctoral dissertation entitled Reading Comic Books Critically: How Japanese Comic Books Influence Taiwanese Students, is an extraordinary achievement in the fields of Comparative Education and Cultural Studies. By applying concepts from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to twenty-first century Asian youth culture, Dr. Hsu provided a fresh optic on globalization’s impact on regional traditions.  Along with her original analysis of a pop culture phenomenon, Dr. Hsu provided a detailed map for educators and researchers who want to explore informal education.

During her time at our school, Fang Tzu was extraordinarily productive, authoring and presenting a dozen papers at conferences in various parts of the country while serving the Paulo Freire Institute as Program Officer and coordinating two summer programs for the Institute. I hope to find an appropriate and inspiring way to celebrate Fang Tzu's life and her amazing gifts as a monthly columnist and published author of young people’s literature in Taiwan, an academic, a dedicated martial artist and an inextinguishable spirit of whom we can all be proud. Please share our sympathy with her parents, husband, sister, brother and colleagues at the Paulo Freire Institute.