Asia as
Action: Scaling Ethnography of the Everyday
A Graduate
Student Conference
June
21st-22nd, 2019
Keynote
Speaker: Viren Murthy, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison:
The University of Chicago Center in Beijing is inviting graduate students and
emerging scholars to participate in a graduate student conference to consider
the meaning and politics of “Asia” in everyday contexts. In 1960, Takeuchi
Yoshimi, a Japanese scholar of Chinese literature, delivered a lecture on “Asia
as Method” to challenge fellow Japanese intellectuals to consider their nation
and region from the global historical situation of “Asia.” If the telos of modernization is not that of
imperialist conquest in the wake of decolonization, peoples of “Asia” must
reckon anew with modern ideas spread from the West while pushing back against
its colonial histories toward actualizing global equality. An intuitive rather
than programmatic formulation, “Asia as method” refers to this ongoing project
of collective subject-formation. Takeuchi saw the scholar’s object as “a
nation’s people in regard to their thoughts and feelings, and through
this…their everyday existence”. Following suit, we seek to estrange and embrace
the notion of “Asia” as a call to scholarly action. We ask, how can
methodologies in the social sciences and humanities re-center around “Asia”
while being informed by the everyday practices, habits, affects and thoughts of
ordinary actors? Recognizing the challenge of using ethnography to represent
the complexities of regional constructs like “Asia,” we encourage innovative
ways of scaling the local and the everyday to speak to inter-Asian histories,
politics and cultures.
We invite
abstracts from disciplines including anthropology, area studies, comparative
literature, cultural studies, geography, history, linguistics, sociology, and
related fields.
Encouraged
topics and themes include but are not limited to:
- Ethnographies of everyday life in “Asia”
- Scales, scale-making, regimes of metricalization
- Imaginaries of “Asia” in mediascapes
- Aspirational China, entrepreneurial selves
- Cities in villages and villages in cities
- Flows of persons and things
- Translations of value, affect and embodied experience
- Anthropocene and the “community of shared future for mankind”
- Pan-Asianism and Afro-Asian-Latin America solidarity
Please
submit a 300-word (max.) abstract by April 1st, 2019 (China Standard Time) to
AsiaAsAction@gmail.com, together with your name, current affiliation, a short
bio, as well as your travel preference (Partial to full travel expenses will be
paid for participants with accepted abstracts).
Due to limited budget to
provide translation, we request that participants submit abstracts, and plan to
present papers, in English.
Conference
Timeline (China Standard Time)
April 1:
Abstract Submission Deadline
April 15:
Notification of Acceptance
May 1:
Registration Deadline
June 1:
Full Paper Submission Deadline
Persons
with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this
conference should contact AsiaAsAction@gmail.com. If you have any inquiries
regarding the conference, please do so as well.
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