TACTICS AND THEORIES FOR A GLOBAL ASIAS PRAXIS

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
This project brings together a diverse group of scholars to work across ranks, disciplines, fields, geographies, and languages on a set of critical concerns animating the possibilities and problems of Global Asias scholarship. Focusing on a set of keywords that highlight both potential overlaps but also points of disagreement between area studies and ethnic studies—INDIGENEITY, LANGUAGE, EPISTEMOLOGY, A/GEOGRAPHY, & TRANSITS—this enterprise is designed to challenge the silos of academic knowledge formation that currently make legible and organize the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas. We envision ongoing working groups that meet virtually in winter/spring 2022, a week-long in-person workshop experience under the auspices of the Global Asias Summer Institute in June 2022, a series of sponsored panels and roundtables at the Global Asias 6 conference in spring 2023, and ultimately, a published volume in winter 2023 or spring 2024. While we hope the edited volume will solidify Global Asias as a vibrant, multidisciplinary field of academic knowledge production and inaugurate a new wave of scholarly and pedagogical interest in Global Asias methods and topics, we are equally focused on how such a project can reimagine the conditions of possibility animating scholarly research on Asia and its multiple diasporas, and lay the groundwork for sustainable and sustaining intellectual exchange across disciplinary, institutional, and field boundaries.

The edited volume will serve as an example of how the collaborative ethos of Global Asias scholarship can create innovative models of academic knowledge-production, as well as a catalyst for generating new approaches to Global Asias scholarship and pedagogy. The volume’s format offers a multi-pronged approach to the composition of content. Such an approach derives from a commitment to enacting the central tenets of Global Asias—a distinctive embrace of multidisciplinarity, collaborative knowledge production that is not consensus-driven, and self-reflexivity—to create an opportunity for different kinds of scholars and different kinds of scholarship to be in dialogue without collapsing them into a unified set of perspectives and approaches.

PARTICIPANTS:

INDIGENEITY
Erin Suzuki, University of California-San Diego
Jenny Chio, University of Southern California
Kyle Shernuk, Queen Mary University
Diego Luis, Davidson College

LANGUAGE
Andrew Leong, University of California-Berkeley
Jerry Won Lee, University of California-Irvine
Fiona Lee, University of Malaya

EPISTEMOLOGY
Carla Nappi, University of Pittsburgh
Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh
Naveen Minai, University of Toronto
Youngoh Jung, University of California-San Diego

A/GEOGRAPHY
Jini Kim Watson, NYU
Omer Aijazi, University of Victoria
Shaolu Yu, Rhodes College

TRANSITS
Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi, University of California-Los Angeles
Neelima Jeychandran, Penn State
Alexander Murphy, University of Chicago
Desirée Valadares, University of California-Berkeley