Call for papers: Asiascape: Digital Asia Anniversary Issue
The Shape of the Asiascape: Ten Years of Digital Asia Research

The peer-reviewed academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia (DIAS) is now inviting contributions for its 2023 anniversary special issue, “The Shape of the Asiascape: Ten Years of Digital Asia Research”. This anniversary issue will take stock of advances and trends in research about digital Asia. It asks what a decade of Asiascape research has revealed about dynamics in the region and its varied digital societies. Are there national or regional Internets that form an ‘Asiascape’, and how do they differ from the ‘global’ Internet? Does ‘digital Asia’ truly exist, and if so: in what guises? By revisiting the current state-of-the-field, the short (4,000-word) contributions to this special issue will examine the multi-disciplinary, regional, and transnational concerns that have shaped Asiascape’s diverse research programmes. Collectively, they will ask how digital Asia features in contemporary discussions, whether in a mainstream, scholarly, or tech journalism context. Looking forward, the contributions will identify potential blindspots in the scholarship and propose ways forward for the next decade of multi- and interdisciplinary digital Asia research. Continue reading →

Dear colleagues,

I’m sharing with you the recording of the Zoom roundtable “In the Event of Women” (with English subtitles).

Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/lCgfWX-7R78

Independently sponsored by the MLA’s LLC Modern and Contemporary Chinese Forum (members: Haiyan Lee, Nick Admussen, Liang Luo, Ping Zhu, and Nicolai Volland), this online roundtable convenes eight feminist scholars whose research interests cover the studies of history, social sciences, literature, and culture in China, Japan, and South Korea to celebrate the publication of Tani Barlow’s new monograph, In the Event of Women (Duke UP, Jan 2022).

Participants:

Tani Barlow (Rice University)
Ruri Ito (Tsuda University)
Rebecca Karl (New York University)
Suzy Kim (Rutgers University)
Nicola Spakowski (University of Freiburg)
Sharon Wesoky (Allegheny College)
Xueping Zhong (Tufts University)
Ping Zhu (University of Oklahoma)

Presider:

Ping Zhu (University of Oklahoma)

Jack Chen, current secretary and incoming chair of the MLA Pre-14th Century Chinese Forum, compiled a full list of Asian-related panels at the MLA 2022. Find the list below.

Best regards,

Liang Luo
Current secretary and incoming chair
MLA Modern and Contemporary Chinese Forum

MLA 2022: Sessions related to East Asia
(V) = virtual; (P) = in person

Thursday, January 6, 2022 / 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM

Decolonial and Indigenous Interventions in Japanophone Media and Literature (V)
Presider: Andrea Mendoza, U of California, San Diego

Presentations

Between Diversity and Assimilation: Revisiting Tadayoshi Himeda’s Ethnographic Documentary / Marcos Centeno-Martin, U of London, Birkbeck

Subversion and Transformation of Natural Landscapes in Medoruma Shun’s Decolonial Fiction / Andrea Boccardi, U of Leeds

Self-Discovery and Assimilation: Colonial Literary Modernity in Japanophone Taiwanese Literature / Ying Xue Liu, U of Maryland, College Park

Japanophone Literature: ‘The Question about Japaneseness’ / Paul McQuade, Cornell U Continue reading →

The Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin is pleased to announce the Texas Asia Conference 2022: “Transitions and Transformations.” The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to January 7, 2022. The conference will take place on February 25th and 26th at the University of Texas at Austin. Please find the CFP information below.

The Texas Asia Conference (TAC) is a biennial and international graduate student conference organized by the graduate students of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The upcoming conference will take place on February 25th and 26th, 2022, at the University of Texas at Austin’s Glickman Conference Center (the conference will move online if necessary). The conference provides a space to present and engage with graduate research work centered on Asia as a regional focus from various disciplinary perspectives. 

With this year’s conference theme, Transitions and Transformations, we invite proposals for individual papers and/or panels that explore various approaches to this topic. The last two years have made precarity a widespread condition. Faced with constant changes and conflicts, we are reaching an inflection point from which political institutions, public health, and ecosystems are taking unpredictable turns. Instead of returning to what has previously been considered the norm, it is high time for us to anticipate and adapt to the new normal. A time of crisis is also a time of opportunity, as we are witnessing new directions and conversations emerging from academia, ranging from reconsiderations of time and space to reassessments of asymmetrical geopolitical relations. Standing at this threshold moment, we propose a colloquium where important dialogues on the shared future of Asia and the world can be initiated. How do we reimagine Asia in a time of transitions and transformations? What are some possible contributions that scholarship on Asia can make to help us better cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene?  

Continue reading →

Call for Papers: Making Gender in China: Third Biennial Conference of the China Academic Network on Gender
Dates: March 29-May 3, 2022. 2hr panels will be held weekly as a virtual conference series on Tuesdays, Toronto time (EST, UTC-5).  
Location: York University, Toronto (online)

We are pleased to announce that the Third Biennial Conference of the China Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE) will be hosted virtually by York University, Toronto. 

The theme of the conference will be ‘Making Gender in China.’ We seek to explore how gender is enacted, negotiated, and disrupted through objects and in the process of making them. How does scrutinizing things (a poem, a cookbook, a translation, a sword, a piece of furniture, noodles, an online protest, or a piece of legislation) help inform and reshape our understanding of gender in China itself? Indeed, material culture and gender studies share a reciprocal methodological outlook on the construction of societal norms. They ask not only how objects – or gender – are being shaped by society, but also how the material world – or gender – in turn shape society itself. Within Chinese studies, fruitful articulations between material culture and gender studies have first focused on areas such as dress, spinning, weaving (Bray, 1997; Ko, 2005). Recent work has expanded into the realm of literati’s writing apparatus, dictionaries and other domestic objects such as furniture, drawing our attention to the importance of interrogating the materiality of the everyday (Ko, 2017; Althenger and Ho, forthcoming). This workshop invites scholars to explore further how gendered divisions of labour or gender roles inform and shape the social lives of objects and vice-versa. If we take gender as a site of social construction, one that is “made,” what do we see when we turn to literal sites where construction takes place: shipyards, factory-floors, theatres, media broadcasting houses, the scholars’ study or the inner quarters? What symbolic and practical social roles do these objects then play in the creation of gender dynamics of daily life? How can they in turn be subverted or redirected from the intention of the maker in the uses to which they are put? Continue reading →

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSAL: “National Identity and Millenials in Northeast Asia: Power and Contestations in the Digital Age” (deadline for proposals: 6 January 2022)

We invite book chapter proposals to be included in a forthcoming volume entitled “National Identity and Millenials in Japan and China: Power and Contestations in the Digital Age” to be published with Routledge (Contemporary Asian Societies Collection).

As Northeast Asian societies and States seek to come to terms with massive transformations – be they demographic, economic, technological or cultural – national identities have come into flux, as socio-economic certainties have waned. This has resulted in ever more prominent and emotional debates surrounding notions of history, belonging, memory, and pride. Younger generations in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan play an increasingly important role in shaping these debates. This collective project seeks to explore the intersection between national identity formation and youth culture in Northeast Asia by focusing on (1) official discourses, (2) popular (visual) culture, and (3) digital spaces as critical venues for constructing collective identities and shaping political cultures among the young. Continue reading →

Klaudia Lee (City University of Hong Kong) and I have proposed a seminar on the theme of “Fantasy and Global Cities, 1830–1930” for the forthcoming American Comparative Literature Association conference in Taipei from June 15–18, 2022 (with contingency plans for an online conference if needed).

The ACLA abstract deadline has recently been extended till November 30. While we have received enough strong proposals for a small seminar on Fantasy and Global Cities, we still have plenty of room for more papers and would be very pleased to receive more abstracts. The CFP is here: https://www.acla.org/fantasy-and-global-cities-1830-1930.

The decision as to whether the conference will be in person or online will be made in January. If you can only attend the conference in one format or the other, when you submit, please contact Klaudia Lee (City University of Hong Kong, hiuylee@cityu.edu.hk) or me (Taipei Tech <sharinschroeder@mail.ntut.edu.tw>). More information on the ACLA conference can be found here: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting-2022.

Thank you!

Sharin Schroeder  <sharinschroeder@mail.ntut.edu.tw>

The Texas Asia Conference (TAC) is a biennial and international graduate student conference organized by the graduate students of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The upcoming conference will take place on February 25th and 26th, 2022, at the University of Texas at Austin’s Glickman Conference Center (the conference will move online if necessary). The conference provides a space to present and engage with graduate research work centered on Asia as a regional focus from various disciplinary perspectives.

With this year’s conference theme, Transitions and Transformations, we invite proposals for individual papers and/or panels that explore various approaches to this topic. The last two years have made precarity a widespread condition. Faced with constant changes and conflicts, we are reaching an inflection point from which political institutions, public health, and ecosystems are taking unpredictable turns. Instead of returning to what has previously been considered the norm, it is high time for us to anticipate and adapt to the new normal. A time of crisis is also a time of opportunity, as we are witnessing new directions and conversations emerging from academia, ranging from reconsiderations of time and space to reassessments of asymmetrical geopolitical relations. Standing at this threshold moment, we propose a colloquium where important dialogues on the shared future of Asia and the world can be initiated. How do we reimagine Asia in a time of transitions and transformations? What are some possible contributions that scholarship on Asia can make to help us better cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene? Continue reading →

Greetings from Georgetown!

We are reaching out because the Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs is currently accepting research manuscripts for Volume 8 (Spring 2022). We welcome submissions from students and scholars and would appreciate it if you could share our call for papers announcement with your students and departments.

The Journal welcomes original social science research papers written on issues relevant to politics, security, economy, culture, and society of contemporary Asia, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Our publication highlights the works of young scholars alongside those of well-established experts, providing a valuable opportunity for graduate students to expand upon their academic portfolio.

Submissions will be considered on a rolling basis until January 31, 2022, so we encourage your students and colleagues to submit their manuscripts soon. All submissions should be 5,000-7,000 words in length. For more details on our formatting guidelines and expectations, please forward the attached “Instructions for Contributors” file or refer to the “Notice to Contributors” section on our website. For any points not addressed therein, we welcome questions and comments sent to our email (gjaa@georgetown.edu). Continue reading →

CFP: Postwar Asian Management and its Mediated Forms, seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting (Taipei, June 15–18, 2022)
Organized by Hannah Airriess and Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang
Submit an abstract: https://www.acla.org/postwar-asian-management-and-its-mediated-forms
Deadline: October 31, 2021

This seminar is interested in postwar media forms in the context of the period’s management theory as it became implemented as corporate practice in East Asia, during an era often said to be defined first by Japanese postwar reconstruction and then by Asian Tiger developmentalism. We wish to explore literary and visual narratives across media that take up questions regarding management in Asia since the end of World War II, with a particular eye toward understanding the way in which managerial organizational logics become manifest as aesthetic practices. To this end, we aim for an examination of both the textual articulation of managerial logics in aesthetic practices and forms as well as the organizational structures of systems and institutions that produce such media. In some cases, these practices revolve around emergent genre forms, as in white collar cinematic narratives produced during Japan’s high-growth era. In other cases, we are more interested in the material cultures that surround cultural products, like the propagandistic newsreels that were produced in Taiwan during the booming 1970s that would be played in theaters before feature films. Continue reading →

Sixth Tone China Writing Contest – Theme: “Generations”
Deadline: 11:59 pm (GMT), April 30, 2022

Each generation has a story to tell. Sixth Tone invites authors from across the globe to submit China-related nonfiction stories centering on the theme of “GENERATIONS.” An all-star panel of international judges including Fuchsia Dunlop, Howard W. French, Peter Hessler, Qian Jianan, Tabitha Speelman, Wu Qi, Xiang Biao, and Zhou Yijun will evaluate the finalists.

Deadline: 11:59 pm (GMT), April 30, 2022. Word limit: 1,000-5,000 words. Entry fee: none. CASH PRIZES: 10 prizes ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 yuan. Quality entries will also be considered for publication on Sixth Tone’s website or podcast. For more details: https://interaction.sixthtone.com/feature/2021/Writing-Contest/index.html

Posted by: Ting Wu fubm@sixthtone.com