Penn State University invites applicants for its annual Global Asias Summer Institute, to be held June 6-10, 2022.
Involvement in SI2022 offers early-career scholars a unique opportunity. Co-directed by Tina Chen (Penn State) and Charlotte Eubanks (Penn State), SI2022 will be part of a larger collective project. The six successful applicants will join an existing team of senior scholars to collaborate on work that will eventually be published in a volume—Tactics and Theories for a Global Asias Praxis—which is under advance contract with the University of Hawai’i Press. More information on the scholars already involved in this project is available on the Global Asias Initiative (GAI) website: https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/book-projects/756-2/.
On the theme:
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—HISTORIES, 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.
Tina and Charlotte will write a substantive introductory essay that will overview Global Asias as an emerging field, and contributors will work in teams on a set of related materials: an abstract and list of questions to frame the research problems raised by each keyword; teaching resources (either a syllabus, a bibliography, or a sample set of lesson plans); and a collaboratively-authored research forum (modeled on the A&Q and Field Trip features pioneered by Verge) that collates shorter (3,000-5,000 words) position papers into a collectively-generated exchange. The diversity of materials and approaches included in the volume reflects a broad understanding of scholarly work and promotes an intellectual approach that resists mastery by building and investing in structures of intellectual engagement and experimentation that embrace disagreement and differences.
Applications Requirements:
To apply, please send the following documents to vergevents@psu.edu by October 15, 2021. Items #1-3 must be sent as a single PDF file; if applicable, the recommendation letter for advanced graduate students may be sent separately.
1. A reflection of 750-1000 words centered on one of the keywords (Histories, Indigeneity, Language, Epistemology, A/Geography, or Transits). Beyond very briefly describing how your research interfaces with this keyword, identify one or more exciting, surprising, or generative insights that you see emerging when/if scholarship on Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Diaspora Studies are brought into conversation, but not alignment, in this area.
2. A sample of current work.
3. A CV (no longer than 2 pp).
4. A letter from a principal advisor about the applicant’s ability to contribute to such a project (in the case of graduate students).
Decisions will be made by December 1, 2021 and there will be a preliminary meeting of the entire team that month. Inquiries regarding the Summer Institute may be directed to Tina Chen, Director of the Global Asias Initiative (tina.chen@psu.edu).
Learn more at https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2021/07/30/si-2022/.
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