The Year of Choosing Dangerously: Anticipating the Impact of the 2024 Elections in the Indo-Pacific and the United States

This event is by invitation only.

An East-West Center and Association for Asian Studies Writing and Policy Workshop

The East-West Center (EWC) is partnering with the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to build a “Network of Networks” bridging the U.S. and the Indo-Pacific. As part of the EWC’s Research Innovation & Collaboration Exchange (RICE) initiative, this collaboration is designed to support experts and public intellectuals from Asia and the U.S. through writing workshops, conferences, and joint publications.

The project aims at generating critical analysis on issues that broadly relate to the 2024 elections. With almost two billion voters heading to the polls in Asia and in the United States, the results of this electoral year will affect most of the world’s population in terms of trade and investment, foreign policy, economic migration, climate change commitments and the future of global democracy and human rights, amongst other issues. The combined effect of these individual elections will likely have significant and lasting repercussions.

For any questions about the workshop, please email Dr. Krisna Uk at krisnauk@asiantsudies.org and Dr. Nicholas Hamisevicz at hamisevn@eastwestcenter.org.

AAS 2024 Annual Conference

The Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference is the largest gathering of individuals devoted to the study of Asia. Bringing together over 3,000 attendees each year from across the globe this conference is the premiere event for individuals interested in connecting with scholars, students, librarians, and historians.

Join Asian studies scholars at the premier Asian studies conference.
Seattle, Washington: March 14-17, 2024
Virtual: March 1, 2024

REGISTER NOW

AAS Digital Dialogues: New Resources in Asian Studies

Register now to join other AAS Members in a showcase of new resources in Asian Studies for 2024. Representatives from four recently launched organizations/initiatives will present their projects, provide an overview of planned activities, and share with audience members how they can get involved. Time will be allocated at the end of the session for audience Q&A with the panelists.

Current AAS membership is required to register. Non-members must join or renew their membership prior to proceeding with Digital Dialogue registration.

We plan to make New Resources in Asian Studies a regular feature of the AAS Digital Dialogues program. Do you have a resource, program, or initiative to share with other AAS members? Contact Digital Media Manager Maura Elizabeth Cunningham (mcunningham@asianstudies.org) to discuss it!

AAS Digital Dialogue: Meet the Bibliography of Asian Studies Editor

Meet the Bibliography of Asian Studies Editor

Wednesday, August 30, 2023, 2:00-3:00pm ET

This session will be an opportunity to meet with David Magier, interim editor of the Bibliography of Asian Studies, to familiarize scholars with the single most indispensable multidisciplinary resource for studying, teaching, and learning about Asia at all levels.

Our popular “Meet the Editor” series returns in August for its second year. These webinars, taking place over four consecutive weeks, will showcase our journals, book series, and online database, providing invaluable information for potential authors. Time will be set aside for questions, which you may ask during the webinar or in advance when you register.

We look forward to welcoming everyone interested in publishing with AAS!

REGISTER NOW for four August AAS Digital Dialogues!

AAS Digital Dialogue: Meet the Education About Asia and Key Issues in Asian Studies Editor

Meet the Education About Asia and Key Issues in Asian Studies Editor

Wednesday, August 23, 2023, 2:00-3:00pm ET

Lucien EllingtonEAA editor, encourages potential authors who are interested in contributing to the journal to attend this session. Those unfamiliar with EAA are strongly encouraged to visit the EAA archives and review author guidelines before the session. Ellington will also discuss the Key Issues in Asian Studies series of classroom texts he edits.

Our popular “Meet the Editor” series returns in August for its second year. These webinars, taking place over four consecutive weeks, will showcase our journals, book series, and online database, providing invaluable information for potential authors. Time will be set aside for questions, which you may ask during the webinar or in advance when you register.

We look forward to welcoming everyone interested in publishing with AAS!

REGISTER NOW for four August AAS Digital Dialogues!

AAS Digital Dialogue: Meet the Asia Shorts Editor

Meet the Asia Shorts Editor

Wednesday, August 16, 2023, 2:00-3:00pm ET

Published by AAS in conjunction with Columbia University Press, Asia Shorts has a unique mission in our contemporary publishing environment. Editor David Kenley will introduce the series and discuss how potential authors can prepare a manuscript for submission.

Our popular “Meet the Editor” series returns in August for its second year. These webinars, taking place over four consecutive weeks, will showcase our journals, book series, and online database, providing invaluable information for potential authors. Time will be set aside for questions, which you may ask during the webinar or in advance when you register.

We look forward to welcoming everyone interested in publishing with AAS!

REGISTER NOW for four August AAS Digital Dialogues!

AAS Digital Dialogue: Meet the Journal of Asian Studies Editor

Meet the Journal of Asian Studies Editor

Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 2:00-3:00pm ET

Joseph S. Alter, Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, will discuss the preparation of manuscripts for submission and the peer review process.

Our popular “Meet the Editor” series returns in August for its second year. These webinars, taking place over four consecutive weeks, will showcase our journals, book series, and online database, providing invaluable information for potential authors. Time will be set aside for questions, which you may ask during the webinar or in advance when you register.

We look forward to welcoming everyone interested in publishing with AAS!

REGISTER NOW for four August AAS Digital Dialogues!

2024 AAS-in-Asia Conference

Get ready for an unforgettable experience at AAS-in-Asia 2024, the conference that brings Asian Studies to a more intimate and engaging setting. Designed specifically for scholars and enthusiasts of Asian Studies, this event offers an incredible opportunity to participate in panel sessions, network with colleagues, and explore the latest research in a smaller, more focused environment.

AAS-in-Asia 2024 is a joint collaboration between the prestigious Association for Asian Studies and the Universitas of Gadjah Mada. While it may be smaller in size compared to the Annual Conferences held in North America, this conference packs a punch with its exciting features. You can expect a diverse range of sessions, thought-provoking keynote speakers, captivating book exhibits, and delightful receptions.

Registration is now open.

AAS-in-Asia

The 8th AAS-in-Asia conference will take place on the Kyungpook National University (KNU) campus in Daegu, Korea, June 24-27, 2023.

 

 

“Refugee Youth Agency in Flux: Active and Passive Waiting in Transit Country Indonesia”

Talk by Realisa Masardi, Universitas Gadjah Mada and University of Michigan

For more than two decades, Indonesia has been a transit spot for asylum seekers from Central Asia, South Asia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia while irregularly en route to Australia. Following Australia’s controversial ‘stop the boats’ policy, thousands of refugees, including the young population, must wait longer in Indonesia to get their refugee status processed by UNHCR and to have a chance to resettle in a third country. As a non-signatory state to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Indonesia has a limited legal framework to protect the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, which causes grave precarious conditions for them. Nevertheless, arbitrariness in Indonesia’s legal framework and its flexibility in handling refugees surprisingly has provided a certain level of “informal protection” and opportunities for young refugees to make maneuvers in the fluid arenas. As they wait, the young people also plan, anticipate, negotiate, hustle, play, and rest. This talk will focus on the dynamics of refugee youths’ agency-in-waiting. Professor Masardi explores how young refugees exercise passive and active waiting and what contributing factors catalyze or impede the distribution of their agency.

Realisa D Masardi is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. She is the awardee of the prestigious 2022 Gosling-Lim Postdoctoral Fellowship in Southeast Asian Studies. Currently, Professor Masardi is completing her postdoc program at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Professor Masardi has been working on the issues of children and young people in several migrants/refugees communities in Southeast Asia, focusing on their identities, access to rights, and agency, particularly on their everyday survival movements. She received her PhD in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her dissertation focuses on the social navigation of independent young refugees from diverse countries facing precarities during transit in Indonesia.

Boundary Pushing in Asian Studies: Editors’ Roundtable

This roundtable is part of the “Boundary Pushing in Asian Studies” workshop organized by the editors of the Journal of Asian Studies in partnership with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Editors of leading journals — Tina Chen (Verge: Studies in Global Asias), Suzy Kim (positions: asia critique), Sumit Guha (Modern Asian Studies), Paolo Sartori (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), Hyung Gu Lynn (Pacific Affairs), and Andrea Jain (Journal of the American Academy of Religion) — will join Joseph Alter, Purnima Dhavan, Kelly Anne Hammond, Kate McDonald, and Albert Park (Journal of Asian Studies). Each editor will talk briefly about their experience highlighting things that are especially important for early career scholars to know and understand about the peer review process. This will be followed by Q&A with participants in the workshop. Registration is free and the roundtable is open to the public.

AAS Digital Dialogue: New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia Book Launch

Join the AAS on Wednesday, November 30 to celebrate the publication of the latest Asia Shorts title, New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia. Edited by Dimitar D. Gueorguiev, this collection includes six essays that examine questions of academic freedom in locations from India to Japan.

New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia examines the increasingly dire state of academic freedom in Asia. Using cross-national data and in-depth case studies, the authors shed light on the multifaceted nature of academic censorship and provide reference points to those working in restrictive academic environments.

Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences: Addressing Multiple Marginalities in South and Southeast Asia

A Symposium organized by The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and The Regional Center for Social Science  and Sustainable Development (RCSD)

As part of a new transnational Project supporting under-resourced scholars of Asia, this three-day symposium will bring together early-career scholars, students, artists and public intellectuals to reflect critically on issues of social, cultural, economic and political marginalization.

With generous support from Sweden, the symposium on Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences: Addressing Multiple Marginalities builds on a prior series of skill-building workshops organized by the Project’s implementing partners located in Cambodia, India, Pakistan and Thailand. This event will highlight current research and local perspectives from communities in South and Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on strengthening emerging scholars’ analytic and interpretive competencies. The symposium will focus especially on conflict and post-conflict areas, where marginalization has entailed multiple intersecting forms of exclusion, inequity and vulnerability.

Organized around a series of roundtable discussions, research presentations and workshops, the symposium will showcase new scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences on a wide array of topics and questions that both emerge from and affect the region. Issues addressed will include, but not be limited to, gender and transgender inequalities; local strategies to mitigate environmental risk; forced-displacement and scholars-at-risk; natural resource conservation and human rights; digital humanities and activism; and non-traditional security issues.

A priority for the symposium is to reframe academic debate in a manner that centres perspectives from the margins and enables participation from under-resourced scholars and institutions in South and Southeast Asia. The emerging scholars selected by the Project’s regional partners will be the driving force in these conversations—furthering their research and analytical skills, sharing local knowledge and strategies for coping with censorship and authoritarianism, exploring possibilities for partnership, and expanding their professional networks across borders and between the margins.

AAS Digital Dialogue: Who Is the Asianist? Book Launch

Join us to celebrate the publication of Who Is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies, a new Asia Shorts volume edited by Will BridgesNitasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D. Sterling.

Who Is the Asianist? reconsiders the past, present, and future of Asian Studies through the lens of positionality, questions of authority, and an analysis of race with an emphasis on Blackness in Asia. From self-reflective essays on being a Black Asianist to the Black Lives Matter movement in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Viet Nam, scholars grapple with the global significance of race and local articulations of difference. Other contributors call for a racial analysis of the figure of the Muslim as well as a greater transregional comparison of slavery and intra-Asian dynamics that can be better understood, for instance, from a Black feminist perspective or through the work of James Baldwin. As a whole, this diversified set of essays insists that the possibilities of change within Asian Studies occurs when, and only when, it reckons with the entirety of the scholars, geographies, and histories that it comprises.

Mechademia: Critical Vistas Upon Global Asian Studies

Mechademia—an intellectual community built around a conference and a journal (University of Minnesota Press)—has stood at the forefront of youth-focused Asian popular culture scholarship since its inception in the early 2000s. With its emphasis upon manga, anime, video games, and other forms of East Asian popular culture and their fan bases, Mechademia has regularly brought together scholars, fans, and practitioners in seeking common dialogue, fresh approaches, and innovative insights.

This Digital Dialogues session seeks to probe the interconnections between Mechademia and Asian Studies. We begin with a brief history of Mechademia led by its founding organizers discussing the impetus for creating the conference and journal. The discussion subsequently broadens to address the following questions:

  • What is the place of popular culture studies in the larger field of Asian Studies?  What can popular culture studies contribute to Asian Studies (and vice versa)?
  • How do fan cultures contribute to our understandings and interactions in Asian Studies?
  • What roles do race, gender, class, nation, and other structuring properties play in the study of fan cultures, with a particular eye to Asian Studies?
  • How might querying popular culture studies help queer Asian Studies?

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Meet the Education About Asia/Key Issues in Asian Studies Editor

Session 4 in the Summer 2022 “Meet the Editor” Series

This AAS Digital Dialogue session will offer attendees a chance to be better positioned for successful publication in the AAS pedagogical publications, Education About Asia (EAA) or Key Issues in Asian Studies (KIAS), both edited by Lucien EllingtonIn order to make the Digital Dialogue session as effective as possible, potential EAA contributors are encouraged to visit the EAA homepage and review editorial guidelines and other relevant information.  Participants who are not familiar, or have limited familiarity, with EAA are encouraged to attend this Digital Dialogue session but it is important that they also visit the EAA online archives and read sample articles, teaching resource essays, and reviews in order to gain a better sense of the publication.

Readers interested in publishing a KIAS volume should first visit the KIAS homepage to learn more about the publication. It is highly recommended before attending this Digital Dialogue session that interested participants visit the Asia Shorts homepage in order to understand how these two publications differ in their mission statements, intended audiences, structure, and length. Time will also be set aside to address questions you are invited to submit in advance (you may submit questions when registering for the session, or through the button below).

Meet the Bibliography of Asian Studies Editor

This AAS Digital Dialogue session will be an opportunity to meet with David Magier, the interim editor of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) so you can get more familiar with the single most indispensable multidisciplinary resource for studying, teaching and learning about Asia at all levels. Dr. Magier will begin the session with a brief overview of the 65-year history of the BAS and how it has evolved into its current form as vast online database. He will talk about the scope and coverage of the BAS and show what makes it unique among research resources for scholarship on Asia, and how it provides access to essential content that would otherwise remain unknown or inaccessible. Dr. Magier will also give a glimpse into how the BAS is compiled, the roles of the Editor, the staff of Asia regional Associate Editors, and the BAS Advisory Board, the engagement with the international Asian Studies community of librarians and scholars, and how prioritization and strategic direction for the BAS are formulated. Finally, he  will outline new developments to expand the BAS and improve the functionality and efficiency of its operations and value to the field of Asian Studies. Some time will also be set aside to address questions.