Chao Center Research & Publications
This page serves as a repository for research presented at Chao Center conferences and events. The work published here will be subsequently published elsewhere, and all authors retain copyright.
2nd Annual Conference (2011)
Phenomena that accompany the movement of individuals, ideas, and goods across the boundaries of nation-states are often glossed as "transnational". Individuals in Asia are evermore bound to each other and to the rest of the world. This increase in transnational encounters has both tested and strengthened national boundaries. We are interested in how intra- and inter- regional, transnational flows impact Asian societies and their interlocutors. While telecommunications technology and convenient air travel facilitate the forging of trade, educational, and cultural links, they may also presage the development of new conflicts and frictions. Our Transnational Asia Conference seeks a cross-disciplinary approach for exploring the processes and effects of "transnationalism" within contemporary and historical periods. We also aim to interrogate the very usefulness of the concept itself.
"Looking Back in the Race Forward: Confucian Technology in Modern China," Caterina Fugazzola (University of San Francisco)
"Japanese Jōhō Bangumi and the notion of affect," Elizabeth Marks (Rice Univesity)
"Migrant assemblages: making place through remittance practice," Igor Rubinov (Clark University)
"'Reiki Balances the Chakras': a Japanese Healing Practice in New Age India," Justin Stein (University of Toronto)
3rd Annual Conference (2012)
Contemporary figurations of the transnational often invoke a language of flows and frictions to describe the increasingly ambiguous role of nation-states and their boundaries in the movement of goods, persons, and ideas. Without abandoning this view altogether, this conference invites participants to move beyond it in order to investigate the dynamics which have led to its promulgation--both as dominant metaphor in the thought of many scholars studying Asia and as lived analytic for individuals making sense of their vertiginous contemporaries and their legacies.
We aim to look at the structures which animate and render possible or hinder experiences of mobility, from those of subjectivity to the economy; the circuits that enable those mobilities, from local bus routes to the trajectories of migrant workers; and the deformations of these established systems that can generate both psychic violence and practices of agency alike. In short, this year's Transnational Asia Graduate Student Conference envisions a cross-disciplinary approach to exploring the processes and effects of “transnationalism,” as well as the conditions supporting its conceptual coherence, in both the historical past and the emerging present. We invite interventions situated at all levels of analysis, from the micro-social to the geopolitical, utilizing a range of methodological approaches.
Papers to be posted soon