Abstract
Deadline: 11/15/2002
Event:
2003
Association for Asian
Studies (AAS) interdisciplinary and comparative dissertation
workshop
Event
Date & Location:
The Workshop will be held in the days immediately following
the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies
at the Hilton hotel in New York City. It will begin the
afternoon of Sunday, March 30, and run through the afternoon
of Tuesday, April 1, 2003.
Information:
The Association for Asian Studies invites applications
from doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences,
and professional schools
working on all the different regions of Asia to participate
in an interdisciplinary and comparative Dissertation Workshop
on "Rethinking
Asian Society/Societies."
All
across Asia, from Pakistan and India through Sri Lanka,
China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, younger scholars
are increasingly concerned with disaggregating societies.
In contrast to, or in debate with, earlier efforts to characterize
whole societies, core cultures, central tendencies, or larger
regions, there is growing attention to processes and structures
of differentiation, heterogeneity, or conflict within Asian
societies.
Some
of these projects are deeply historical. Others are exploring
the role of global contemporary economic, political, and
cultural forces in energizing or generating internal differences
and tensions. In the process they are rethinking or recasting
earlier formulations of the internal structures, relationships,
and dynamics of the various societies with a new focus on,
or perspectives from, peripheries, borders, minorities,
indigenous populations, migrations, diasporas, transnational
linkages, class, gender, and generational differentiation.
These studies are inevitably raising complex issues regarding
social, religious, ethnic, class, and gender identities,
internal conflicts and cohesion, as well as debates around
citizenship and universal human rights. These divisions
and issues are of course not totally new, but in many cases
seem to be intensifying. Certainly, there is a great deal
of new attention to them.
This
workshop is intended for students who are working on or
towards a dissertation dealing with some sub-set of these
issues and their
implications in contemporary or historical settings, and
who are interested in thinking about their work in broader
comparative terms. The workshop is limited to 12 students,
ideally from a broad array of disciplines and working on
a wide variety of materials --aesthetic, archival,
ethnographic, political, sociological, etc.--in a variety
of time periods, and in various regions of Asia. It will
also include a small multidisciplinary and multi-area faculty
with similar concerns.
The
workshop is designed to enable students just beginning to
work on these issues, or else well into them, to engage
in intensive discussions of their own and each otherscross-regional
exchange and will also explore possibilities for continuing
contact among interested students and faculty.
Submission
Guidelines / Information:
Applicants need not have advanced to candidacy but must
have at least drafted a dissertation research proposal.
Applications are also welcome from doctoral students in
the early phases of writing their dissertations.
Applications
consist of two items only:
(1):
two copies of a current Curriculum Vitae
(2):
two copies of the dissertation proposal, or if the research
and writing is well under way, a statement -- not more than
10 pages, double
spaced -- of the specific issues being addressed, the intellectual
approach, and the materials being studied.
Application
materials (hard copy only -- no e-mail) must reach the Dissertation
Workshop Program, AAS, 1021 East Huron St, Ann Arbor MI,
48104, NO LATER THAN NOVEMBER 15, 2002.
Workshop
participants will be selected on the basis of the submitted
projects, the potential for useful exchanges among them,
and a concern to include a wide range of disciplinary perspectives,
intellectual traditions, and regions of Asia. Applicants
will be informed whether or not they have been selected
for the Workshop during the first week of December, 2002.
Registration
Information:
The AAS is able to provide limited financial support
for participants including two nights accommodations, meals
and "need-based" travel funds up to a maximum
of $300. Students needing additional funds to attend the
workshop are encouraged to approach their home institutions
for support. (It is hoped that participants also will attend
the AAS annual meeting immediately prior to the workshop.)
Contact:
For further information about the Workshop, or eligibility,
please e-mail Michael Paschal mpaschal@aasianst.org
or David Szanton
Szanton@uclink.berkeley.edu.
