Presentation Type: Panel Presentation
Armenians in Japan: Historical Perspectives
Given Armenia’s geographical location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, as well as historical circumstances, Armenian history has often been defined by migration, border crossing, transnational interaction and international trade. Japan, however distantly located, has also become a destination for Armenian travellers, traders, and even refugees, who arrived in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. …
Jesuit Cartography and the Translation of Knowledge in Early Modern Global Asia
The concept of translation has emerged recently as a way to understand the cross-cultural and trans-national movements of knowledge. The study of translation in this sense is the study of a practice that involves power struggles and different interests and is also social, collaborative, and multidirectional. Translation is moreover, not only the vehicle by which …
Making the Body Visible in Contemporary Japan: Femininity, Beauty, and the Female Form in Popular Culture
In contemporary Japanese cultural products, what does it mean to be embodied? Whose bodies are made visible, how and why? How does one represent the ‘womanly’ body in contemporary Japan? What kind of body is desired and permissible? To explore these questions this panel takes a transdisciplinary approach to the construction and performance of ‘female …
Trans-cultural Mobility and the Changing Notion of “Universality”: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Finding ‘Universality’
The concept of “universality” once played a critical role in our understanding of culture. However, over the years, the concept has been criticized, mainly for its western centric foundation and fantasizing an idealized modernity. It is argued that universality has different meanings at diverse situations, for instance at local and trans-cultural levels, making our understanding …
Threatening Discourses and State Anxieties in Southeast Asia, Past and Present
In the heyday of Marxist and nationalist scholarship on Southeast Asia, writers of the 1970s and 1980s revelled in recounting histories of overt resistance to colonial or state authority such as riots, rebellions, and revolutions (Kerkvliet 1977, Chatthip 1984, U Maung Maung 1990). However, since the publication of James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985), …
Alternative Ethics in the Politics of Knowledge and Authority: Focusing on Human-Environment Relations in China, Tibet and South Korea
We explore alternative ethics and their political work through ethnographic investigations in China, Tibet, and South Korea: contexts that have undergone drastic sociopolitical change accompanied by an increasingly complicated politics of ecological thinking. Recent scholarship has provided important insights into the emergence of alternative ethics in non-Western environmentalism (Cadena and Blaser 2018) – through interactions …
Critical Perspectives on Chinese Infrastructures
Alongside recent work that has attempted to bring the broader “infrastructure turn” in the social sciences into deeper contact with work in China studies (see Oakes 2019), this session brings together scholars employing a variety of critical perspectives on Chinese infrastructures. The papers gathered in this session follow other infrastructure research in asking how (and …
Transmuting Wen: Writing Enterprises, Transcultural Encounters, and Transmedial Entanglements in the Chinese World Since the Late Imperial Era
As the end of the 19th century witnessed drastic transformations in Chinese history, fresh contents, foreign ideas, and innovative media challenged the time-honored concept of wen, namely writings that manifest Chinese culture. As China increasingly participated in the global circulation of modern culture, writing was no longer the only primary means by which its culture …
Affective Politics on the Rise: The Emotional Turn in Studying Politics in Asia – The Case of China and India
In the last few years, a renewal of academic interest in affect (the more embodied and less conscious dimension of the human feeling) and emotion (feelings which are more conscious and anchored by language and meaning) is sweeping through all social science disciplines (Clough and Halley, 2007). In political studies, affects and emotions are considered …
NGO, Network and Activism in China
This panel sheds light on how community-based activists organise their activities in contemporary China that falls in the dichotomy of the authoritarian state and civil society. To move beyond this Eurocentric imagination on the political dynamics of collective action, the three papers map out the making of the network in activist programs for migrant workers, …