Area Studies in Flux Workshop

Please note that ticket holders are expected to attend the Area Studies in Flux conference, please get your conference tickets here. 

This workshop is an opportunity for participants to share their ideas in relation to their own work. Group discussions will be moderated and will address one of the conference themes: 

• Area and disciplinary thinking: How does the idea of area trouble assumptions about the production of knowledge and its disciplinary boundaries? How are place and field intertwined? How have Area Studies been configured from different locations? How does their emplacement in multiple and diverse locations challenge or reproduce power structures, inequalities and hierarchies? 
• Movements and flows: How might a focus on mobility, flows and connections reshape our understanding of the dynamics of area? How useful is it to think about Area Studies and/in flux? What are the implications of a reconceptualisation of Area Studies as turbulent, transgressive and changeable?
• Imaginaries of place and space: How have imaginative worlds in fiction and fantasy (novels, films, visual arts, music) been productive for conceptualising place and space within the fields of area studies? How might they be in the future?
• Thinking are differently: How do alternative space-makers (for example language, migration, religion, technology, infrastructures and networks) constitute/contest historical definitions of area and create new ones? What is at stake in such shifts?

Please register here. 

The Area Studies in Flux conference is convened by the IAS and SSEES in collaboration with PKU, Beijing, and is designed to go beyond Euro/US-centrism to explore ‘area’ from diverse vantage points and emplaced disciplinary traditions.

All welcome. Please note that there may be photography and/or audio recording at some events. Please follow this FAQ link for more information. Tickets are required for this workshop.

Image: Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot III, 2009, Stainless steel and neon tube, 234 x 223 x 223 cm. (92 1/ x 87 3/4 x 87 3/4 in.) © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy the artist and MdbK Leipzig (Photo: dotgain.info)