Deadline
July 31, 2024
We are excited to support the following panels four for inclusion at the 2025 AAAS conference:
- Activist Objects in Global Asias: Materiality, Affect, and Politics | Oxana Jeoung-Rakova, aksyona@snu.ac.kr, Elias J. Alexander eliasjalexander@gmail.com
- Imagining a Global Asias Curriculum | Fan Yang, yanyang@umbc.edu
- Whose verse? Which verse? Multiverse! Global Asias in/as Alternative Space-Times | Tianyi Shou, ts833@cornell.edu, Zhen Cheng, zc398@cornell.edu
- Converging Place: Urban Humanities and a Global Asias Itinerary | Jacqueline Barrios, jacquelinejeanb@arizona.edu
250 word abstracts and 2-page CVs should be submitted to organizers by July 31, 2024. Please find the individual panel statements and the organizers’ contact information below. Please note: these panels will be submitted for the in-person AAS conference in Columbus, March 13-March 16, 2025.
Activist Objects in Global Asias: Materiality, Affect, and Politics
Oxana Jeoung-Rakova (aksyona@snu.ac.kr)
Elias J. Alexander (eliasjalexander@gmail.com)
The creative use of objects for social activism—from candlelight in South Korean political rallies to umbrellas in Hong Kong protests—has been extensively studied and discussed as an important aspect of social movements and political engagement. Aligning with the argument that political engagement involves more than just discourse, this panel aims to extend dialogue on the culture of activism in Global Asias and amongst Asian diasporas by exploring the agentive role of activist objects. Specifically, by examining how artifacts produced by activists or those within marginalized populations can influence or even shape political engagement, this panel aims to complicate the study of Global Asias vis-ávis the materiality of social movements to advance said study’s theoretical and historical dimensions. The panel welcomes perspectives from studies of material culture, visual culture, history, anthropology, politics, and related disciplines that address such theoretical questions in the context of Global Asias both historically and contemporaneously. We seek to elucidate how the study of material culture can unveil the opaque mechanisms of social activism in Asia and its diasporas over time. This panel asks how a focus on an ontology and the material properties of objects can shed light on the emergence of specific social movements. How can we trace the sensory and emotional impact of particular artifacts on activists and those within marginalized populations? How do such objects and their resultant affects circulate within wider transnational settings? And how might we trouble an understanding of what defines activist engagement through the study of affective materiality?
Imagining a Global Asias Curriculum
Fan Yang (yanyang@umbc.edu)
This interdisciplinary roundtable, inspired by the Mellon-funded Global Asias Initiative (AY 2024-2027) at UMBC, invites participants to collectively imagine an innovative curriculum that reflects the key concerns and approaches typically associated with Global Asias. It encourages scholars with wide-ranging research expertise, teaching interests, and institutional experiences to join in the conversation, including but not limited to Cultural Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Global and International Studies, Literary Studies, Geography, Asian American Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Asian Studies. The roundtable will adopt an interactive format for all speakers and audiences to share perspectives and generate new ideas for a Global Asias curriculum that would prepare students as world-making agents at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Of particular interest are the ways in which 1) the Area Studies orientation of conventional Asian Studies programs can benefit from the insights, methodologies, and findings of Global Asias; 2) the incorporation of Global Asias into General Education can expand a critical engagement with the rising global significance of Asian nation-states and changing demographics of Asian and Asian diasporic students in North America; 3) a Global Asias curriculum can create synergies with programs such as Global Affairs/International Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Black Studies to benefit more students from historically marginalized groups; 4) the theoretical rigor and boundary-breaking energy of Global Asias can inform social justice initiatives that have the potential to transform higher education institutions, including those designated as Minority-Serving and/or Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions.
Whose verse? Which verse? Multiverse! Global Asias in/as Alternative Space-Times
Tianyi Shou ts833@cornell.edu
Zhen Cheng zc398@cornell.edu
Multiverse, parallel world, alternate universe (AU), alternate reality…the imagination of other worlds and lives have many names in creative works. Remarkably, the recent decade witnessed flourishing works exploring the theme’s intersection with global Asias: with the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once, the focus shifted from making Asian characters visible in popular representation of diversity, to foregrounding Asia(ness) in imagining multiplicity and plurality in our interconnected globalized present. Could the “multiverse” provide an alternative way of imagining the spatiotemporality of global Asias? How does the trope engage with the context of neoliberal multiculturalism marked by cosmopolitan mobility, on the one hand, and ethnicized engulfment, on the other? By imagining alternative worlds that simultaneously and independently exist, how can we rupture, repair, or reconstruct the world we inhabit?
Inspired by these questions, this panel encourages exploration of the “multiverse” in creative works spanning art, literature, film, theater, and games. By opening up the term from a sci-fi sub-genre to a critical lens conceptualizing Asia/Asianness as a nexus connecting migration, belonging, and community, the panel aims to demonstrate how even as borders are policed by cultural, racial, ethnic, and national differences, imaginations of alternative space-times transgress and proliferate. Accordingly, we invite abstracts from a wide variety of contributors who can share examples that offer unexpected and expansive interpretations of multiversal possibility in relation to Global Asias. How does the idea of the multiverse create vocabularies for rethinking the literature and media of global Asias, such as diasporic memoirs and non-fiction, as generators of alternative space-times? Can exploring the term’s proximity to the uneven historical legacies of global imperialism and colonialism connect to interdisciplinary debates of “pluriverse” in decolonial studies, “critical fabulation” in critical race studies, and more?
Converging Place: Urban Humanities and a Global Asias Itinerary
Jacqueline Barrios jacquelinejeanb@arizona.edu
This panel invites participants to explore intersections between studies in Global Asias and the emerging field of urban humanities, an approach to critical spatial research, design, pedagogy and engagement that uses practices from architecture, urban studies, and the humanities, that aims “not only [at] understanding cities in a global context but also intervening in them,” as LA-based authors of Urban Humanities: New Practices for Re-imagining the City (MIT, 2020) articulate. How might the tools of engaged spatial transdisciplinarity further elaborate Tina Chen’s “imaginable ageography,” a formulation that opens “new conceptual frontiers for thinking about Asia and its multiple diasporas”? This panel seeks to galvanize and respond to such questions as:
• What are the locales, monuments, architectural objects, infrastructure(s) or (micro)urbanisms that enable a flexible notion of Asia? What modes of inhabiting, placekeeping or transformation do these sites engender? How do we interpret their temporalities or envision their afterlives?
• What spatial formations or theories animate Global Asias’ inter-fields, i.e. Orientalism(s), “the Pacific Rim,” extraterritoriality, archipelagos, demilitarized zones, Chinatowns, to name a few? What are their intersections and deviations when deployed in research, design, activism?
• What are affordances and limitations of emplaced study and collaboration? What archives, materials, methodologies and communities enable new ways to sense and shape the places of Asia?
• How does attending to the locales of Asian diasporic being enable new itineraries and cartographies of relation, and even solidarity, to emerge? How does work in these fields enable us to recuperate and enact spaces to belong?