Call for Proposals: Resistance and Resilience: Repositioning Taiwan
28th NATSA Annual Conference | June 22-24, 2023 | Irvine, California
Recent years have seen challenges, both new and old, for the global community. Such new challenges include the expansion of authoritarian influence and aggression, a global pandemic that has reignited debates on different forms of governance, polarization in democratic societies, and technological developments further enabling digital authoritarianism and inequality. Old modes of domination and marginalization, such as those pertaining to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, colonialism, and beyond also continue to persist and interweave with new global conditions. These dynamics play out not only in entrenched ways of seeing and framing but also in the dominant narratives, subject matters, and methodologies in academic research. Standing at this historical juncture of instability and change, we seek reflexive and critical engagements that can open up opportunities to reimagine ways of coping with, navigating, and collaboratively shaping the new realities of today’s world.
The North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) has, since its inauguration, dedicated itself to being a platform that can exhibit the diverse perspectives and values of Taiwan and Taiwan Studies. We believe that the inclusivity and diversity of Taiwanese society provide a space for developing alternative views, theories, and narratives that deconstruct and destabilize dominant and hegemonic perspectives. It is in the midst of transitions and transformations that different modes of resistance, resilience, and repositioning emerge. We see these new opportunities as a fluid process of recognizing power dynamics, implementing multifaceted methods of ensuring inclusivity and sustainability, and negotiating meaning-making paradigms that span the wider relations of scholars/practitioners/activists and the communities we work with/for. We welcome proposals that shed light on different modes of resistance, resilience, and repositioning using Taiwan as a case, a method, a theory, a practice, a substantive area, or in any other capacity.