AAS Dissertation Workship: "States, Elites, Citizens, and Subjects"

The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. is pleased to announce the seventh consecutive AAS Dissertation Workship, which will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting in Atlanta on April 6-9, 2008.

The states of Asia have long been—and are still today—extremely diverse in structures, powers, ideology, and legitimation. Their relationships with political, social, and religious elites, other subjects, citizens, and variously marginal minorities have also been extremely varied. These relationships have also evolved over time, subtly or directly challenging and creating new loyalties and national identities. Whether relatively stable or in flux, these relationships are often manifested in legislative, judicial, party, tax, education, and religious systems, in literature and language policies, and in the military, external wars, and internal surveillance and controls. Equally important, Asian states have often been—and at times still are—challenged and prodded to change from below.

Adding an interpretive dimension to these complexities, many of the descriptions and analyses of these relationships produced by outsiders (and some insiders) during the colonial and or immediately post-colonial periods are now being challenged by new research using explicitly post-colonial perspectives and theories.

This workshop is intended to bring together doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences: (1) who are developing dissertation proposals or are in early phases of research or dissertation writing; and (2) who are seeking to develop new, richer, more accurate, more subtle or robust understandings of historic or contemporary Asian states and their interactions with their elites, citizens, and subjects. The workshop will be limited to 12 students, ideally from a broad array of disciplines and working on a wide variety of materials in a variety of time periods, and in various regions of Asia. It also will include a small multidisciplinary and multi-area faculty with similar concerns.

The workshop will be scheduled for the days immediately following the 2008 AAS annual meeting in Atlanta. It will cover two-and-a-half days of intense discussion beginning the evening of Sunday, April 6, and running through the afternoon of Wed. April 9.

The AAS will be able to provide limited financial support for participants including three night’s 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.

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, and

(2) Two copies of the dissertation proposal, or if the research and writing is well under way, a statement of the specific issues being addressed, the intellectual approach, and the materials being studied. Neither the proposal nor statement should exceed 10 double-spaced pages in length.

Application materials (hard copy only, no email) must reach the Dissertation Workshop Program, no later than December 11, 2007.

Association for Asian Studies

1021 East Huron St

Ann Arbor, MI 48104

 

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 by early January.

For further information about the workshop, or eligibility, please contact Michael Paschal, mpaschal@aasianst.org, or David Szanton, Szanton@uclink.berkeley.edu.

For more info please contact:
David Szanton
szanton@uclink.berkeley.edu

Published: Sunday, April 06, 2008

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