This working group brings together scholars across Rutgers in order to foster ongoing conversations aimed at building a University-wide endeavor to advance the study of Global Asia at Rutgers. This initiative recognizes that Asia is home to two-thirds of the world population and the center of twenty-first century challenges, ranging from trade wars to nuclear proliferation, refugee crises to environmental disasters. Solutions to these problems require a renewed, integrative focus on Asia’s place in the world – and the world’s place in Asia. While the growing policy and academic emphasis on global processes and transnational relations challenges a traditional area studies model of scholarship, recent trends show nationalism and regionalism to be on the rise, due in part to globalization itself. Because Rutgers is home to a wide diversity of scholars actively engaging in research on Asia, we are uniquely positioned to take a leading role in reshaping conversations on the region. Our goals are to transform Rutgers into a hub of expertise on Asia and its diasporic and hemispheric locales by leveraging existing, but scattered, faculty expertise, as well as existing academic programs across the University, to better respond to and engage the Asian and Asian American communities at Rutgers and beyond. We will work towards integrating existing faculty collaborations, programs, and student/alumni organizations focused on Asia and Asian America. We seek to move beyond traditional area studies models, which grew out of policies responding to a Cold War era world order. Instead, we will foster deeper examination of the fundamental intellectual underpinnings of area studies in a new era of globalization and workshop new ways of framing regional and transregional conversations. This working group grows out of several years of ongoing discussion, aimed at identifying and developing areas of research collaboration across schools and departments. Our theme for this year is gender and mobility, which takes on a particularly pressing relevance given the current crisis surrounding migration, borders, and climate change, particular in light of our society's ongoing efforts to grapple with a global pandemic.
Organizers
