Sponsored by the Leiden Global Interactions Research Profile and IIAS

August 31-Sept 1 2012

Conference Description/CFP:

The second annual Leiden Global Interactions (LGI) conference will partner with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) to critically explore Asian migrations as a globalizing force.

The theme of Asian migrations, in the broadest sense, touches upon a wide array of practices, social issues and configurations of power. From historical trade networks that  made possible European colonial empires – to unexpected global trajectories of circulated goods, images and technologies – to the redefinition of urbanization by processes emerging from the ‘Global South’ – the mobility and influence of Asian peoples and productions have been a driving force in reshaping global landscapes and relationships from ancient to modern times. This conference seeks to gain a nuanced understanding of Asia’s role in historical and modern articulations of the global and will focus on exploring the diverse formations and conditions of Asian mobilities and the impacts they have in various local and global arenas.  

The spatial politics of urbanism, state policies, natural and humanitarian disasters, development projects, labor markets, infrastructures of inclusion and exclusion, and new technologies often situate Asian migrant forms with the problematics of diaspora, displacement, border-crossing, traveling, fragmentation, hybridity and nomadology. As much as these mobilities can lead to imaginative new global forms and forces, they also produce new insecurities, anxieties and violence.

This conference seeks to explore the problematics of place and culture from diverse and distinctly Asian perspectives on mobility, identity, locality and transnationality.  We are particularly interested in the following topics and issues with respect to Asian migration:

-          Agents of empire: coalescence and collapse

-          Asia in the international system

-          The dialectics of mobility and place-making

-          Displaced subjects/objects: people, commodities and ideas

-          Traders and missionaries in Asia

-          Infrastructures of inclusion/exclusion: techniques of control and modes of their circumvention

-          Intra-Asian circuits of mobility

-          Scholarly Interactions

-          Transnational identities (diasporic and non-diasporic)

-          The politics of aspiration

This two day conference  will be preceded by a PhD master class on the same theme. All student participants will attend the conference and participate in discussions. A select number of students may also be invited to present their work at the conference. In order to encourage this next generation of scholars, we ask that the conference scholars be open to engaging with the students at various planned events.

Submission details are forthcoming. Please check back.