When we began ideating about the IACS 2023 14th Biennial Conclave more than a year ago, we could not have foreseen that it would turn out to be such a phenomenally successful event in attracting so many of our network members in this post-pandemic time. The conclave organizing committee dreamt up many ways in which the event could proceed. The idea of the Research Clusters was a novel one for IACS; but even more novel was the idea that our meetings in Ahmedabad would be based on the work done by the clusters for an entire year before the members arrived at the Landing Zone on July 27, 2023.
The conclave witnessed the participation of 176 distinguished delegates from over 80 institutions, forming a vibrant cluster of 19 research groups converging together in a transformative intellectual journey. With diverse representation from India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and countries in Europe and North America, the event celebrated the richness of global cultural perspectives represented in a wide array of activities, ranging from data visualization, 93 research paper presentations, 1 book talk and launch, 5 film screenings with local partners in India, 6 video art screenings, plenary sessions and talks by special invitees, and a field visit to the Gandhi Ashram, fostering an engaging and immersive exchange of knowledge and ideas.
Plenary Sessions
Not by Eyes Alone: The World of Binodebehari Mukherjee, Gulammohammed Sheikh: This keynote by one of the most eminent artists in Asia dwelt on the work of a leading 20th century painter who built his iconic visual world in spite of being sight-impaired from childhood. Mukherjee used senses other than sight to create large murals such as the 80-foot long one in Shantiniketan’s Hindi Bhavan that represented an ‘epic song of humanity’.
The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia Revisited: 2023, Ho Tzu Nyen: The keynote session by this famous Singaporean artist deliberated on what constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia — a region never unified by language, religion or political power.
The speaker introduced his landmark work by proposing 26 terms — one for each letter of the English / Latin alphabet. Each term is a concept, a motif, or a biography, and together they are threads weaving together the torn and tattered tapestry of southeast asia.
Overall, the conclave highlighted the significance of fostering cross-cultural understanding and appreciation. It underscored the importance of promoting dialogue and empathy to bridge cultural gaps and build new knowledge of and for the Asian century. Research Clusters focussing on media strived to showcase multiple points of cultural intersection anchored on media consumption and to generate a parallel media landscape much like the media material circulating beyond cultural and political maps, spreading across Asian countries including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Myanmar. Clusters also focussed on issues of cultural production by specific communities in Asia highlighting the role of creative practice and performance in addressing local histories of conflict, discrimination, and representation.
Moving beyond specificities, clusters on ‘commoning’ and ‘transnational’ consumption of media materials were informed by the logic that there is an awakening of the terms ‘commons’ and ‘commoning’ as producing alternative paradigms for collaboration and collective sharing of recourses based on democratic participation for the wellbeing of humanity in a sound ecological ecosystem. Emergent themes included discussion on circulation of films from other South and East Asian countries that, until recently, were confined to their domestic market. These research clusters gathered the spirit of building and sharing knowledge and resources across regions and continents by discussing the growing transnationality of non-Western cultural commodities.
The clusters on commoning and the transnational highlighted the significance of dynamics of producers and fans of diverse backgrounds in terms of age, gender, class and ethnicity. At the same time, they also opened up cross-regional commoning between Asia and other regions, recovering forgotten connections separated by colonial histories and global power structures. These and other research networks at the conclave include transnational, trans-disciplinary collectives of scholars and creative practitioners with a shared critical interest in how diverse and evolving forms of mobility and immobilization are shaping human lifeworlds in and across Asia today.
Clusters on mobility deliberated on four nodes: religions, commodities, stories, and the state. Members discussed the Indian Ocean as a globalising arena during the premodern, early modern and modern periods. By bringing to the table a wide variety of sources - textual, archival, visual, olfactory, and oral - discussions showcased the relevance of the ocean or seascape as a method rather than merely seeing it as a geographical or historical site. Related clusters employed comparative and multimodal methodologies for understanding (im)mobility beyond the metropolitan west, covering various aspects such as cultural and artistic forms, shifting moral and practical values and/or risks, and the changing meanings of concepts including diaspora, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation.
IACS 2023 also witnessed the participation of scholars seeking to investigate how young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media. Specifically, it looked at negotiations around the institutions of family, marriage, and tertiary education, all three of which appear to be undergoing profound transformation due to digital mediation. Other clusters focussed on different types of borders as inseparable assemblages co-produced by colonial/imperial racialization, gendering, sexualization, secularization, nation-and-state making, elimination and regulation of languages, and more.
Clusters on digital scholarship pointed out the Indian experiments in using digital technology that come packaged in the rhetoric of help and development and may set alarming precedents for other governments and democracies. These precedents are characterized by “overload” of data, “creep” of technology into citizens’ lives, and an “excess” of governmental control leading to “slow death” of citizens. With reference to digitally mediated discourse, participants analysed the conditions that give rise to conspiratorial thinking and narrative about the hidden workings of power, especially in relation to the structure of digital environments and government surveillance.
In a nutshell, this conclave heralded a new form of scholarly networking towards transforming old norms and fostering new modes of knowledge exchange. The event prepared the ground for new conversations about how to collectively shape the future of what it means to do inter-Asian cultural studies in the complex, unequal and divided world of today. This year’s theme, ‘Post-Pandemic Futures: Re-mapping Inter-Asian Routes’, expanded our interrogations of culture and strengthened our alliances across Asia and the world.
After the intense deliberations of the conclave, all the research clusters are eagerly shaping their future endeavours. They are strategizing to advance cultural studies through edited books and journal issues, co-authored journal papers, webinar series, and workshop series.
Click here for a complete list of research clusters and their detailed activities.
The conclave witnessed the participation of 176 distinguished delegates from over 80 institutions, forming a vibrant cluster of 19 research groups converging together in a transformative intellectual journey. With diverse representation from India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and countries in Europe and North America, the event celebrated the richness of global cultural perspectives represented in a wide array of activities, ranging from data visualization, 93 research paper presentations, 1 book talk and launch, 5 film screenings with local partners in India, 6 video art screenings, plenary sessions and talks by special invitees, and a field visit to the Gandhi Ashram, fostering an engaging and immersive exchange of knowledge and ideas.
Plenary Sessions
Not by Eyes Alone: The World of Binodebehari Mukherjee, Gulammohammed Sheikh: This keynote by one of the most eminent artists in Asia dwelt on the work of a leading 20th century painter who built his iconic visual world in spite of being sight-impaired from childhood. Mukherjee used senses other than sight to create large murals such as the 80-foot long one in Shantiniketan’s Hindi Bhavan that represented an ‘epic song of humanity’.
The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia Revisited: 2023, Ho Tzu Nyen: The keynote session by this famous Singaporean artist deliberated on what constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia — a region never unified by language, religion or political power.
The speaker introduced his landmark work by proposing 26 terms — one for each letter of the English / Latin alphabet. Each term is a concept, a motif, or a biography, and together they are threads weaving together the torn and tattered tapestry of southeast asia.
Overall, the conclave highlighted the significance of fostering cross-cultural understanding and appreciation. It underscored the importance of promoting dialogue and empathy to bridge cultural gaps and build new knowledge of and for the Asian century. Research Clusters focussing on media strived to showcase multiple points of cultural intersection anchored on media consumption and to generate a parallel media landscape much like the media material circulating beyond cultural and political maps, spreading across Asian countries including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Myanmar. Clusters also focussed on issues of cultural production by specific communities in Asia highlighting the role of creative practice and performance in addressing local histories of conflict, discrimination, and representation.
Moving beyond specificities, clusters on ‘commoning’ and ‘transnational’ consumption of media materials were informed by the logic that there is an awakening of the terms ‘commons’ and ‘commoning’ as producing alternative paradigms for collaboration and collective sharing of recourses based on democratic participation for the wellbeing of humanity in a sound ecological ecosystem. Emergent themes included discussion on circulation of films from other South and East Asian countries that, until recently, were confined to their domestic market. These research clusters gathered the spirit of building and sharing knowledge and resources across regions and continents by discussing the growing transnationality of non-Western cultural commodities.
The clusters on commoning and the transnational highlighted the significance of dynamics of producers and fans of diverse backgrounds in terms of age, gender, class and ethnicity. At the same time, they also opened up cross-regional commoning between Asia and other regions, recovering forgotten connections separated by colonial histories and global power structures. These and other research networks at the conclave include transnational, trans-disciplinary collectives of scholars and creative practitioners with a shared critical interest in how diverse and evolving forms of mobility and immobilization are shaping human lifeworlds in and across Asia today.
Clusters on mobility deliberated on four nodes: religions, commodities, stories, and the state. Members discussed the Indian Ocean as a globalising arena during the premodern, early modern and modern periods. By bringing to the table a wide variety of sources - textual, archival, visual, olfactory, and oral - discussions showcased the relevance of the ocean or seascape as a method rather than merely seeing it as a geographical or historical site. Related clusters employed comparative and multimodal methodologies for understanding (im)mobility beyond the metropolitan west, covering various aspects such as cultural and artistic forms, shifting moral and practical values and/or risks, and the changing meanings of concepts including diaspora, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation.
IACS 2023 also witnessed the participation of scholars seeking to investigate how young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media. Specifically, it looked at negotiations around the institutions of family, marriage, and tertiary education, all three of which appear to be undergoing profound transformation due to digital mediation. Other clusters focussed on different types of borders as inseparable assemblages co-produced by colonial/imperial racialization, gendering, sexualization, secularization, nation-and-state making, elimination and regulation of languages, and more.
Clusters on digital scholarship pointed out the Indian experiments in using digital technology that come packaged in the rhetoric of help and development and may set alarming precedents for other governments and democracies. These precedents are characterized by “overload” of data, “creep” of technology into citizens’ lives, and an “excess” of governmental control leading to “slow death” of citizens. With reference to digitally mediated discourse, participants analysed the conditions that give rise to conspiratorial thinking and narrative about the hidden workings of power, especially in relation to the structure of digital environments and government surveillance.
In a nutshell, this conclave heralded a new form of scholarly networking towards transforming old norms and fostering new modes of knowledge exchange. The event prepared the ground for new conversations about how to collectively shape the future of what it means to do inter-Asian cultural studies in the complex, unequal and divided world of today. This year’s theme, ‘Post-Pandemic Futures: Re-mapping Inter-Asian Routes’, expanded our interrogations of culture and strengthened our alliances across Asia and the world.
After the intense deliberations of the conclave, all the research clusters are eagerly shaping their future endeavours. They are strategizing to advance cultural studies through edited books and journal issues, co-authored journal papers, webinar series, and workshop series.
Click here for a complete list of research clusters and their detailed activities.