The Young Scholars Symposium is an annual event organized by the Center for Global Asia and the Global Perspectives on Society program, NYU Shanghai. It brings together doctoral and postdoctoral fellows at NYU Shanghai and universities across China to share insights into issues pertaining to Asia in a global context. The symposium is open to early career scholars (doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows) working on Asia-related topics, especially those who explore transregional connections, disconnections, and comparisons.

This year’s theme is “Multicentrality across Asia and beyond.” The term “multicentrality” invites us to rethink how “centers” are made, recognized, and contested, rather than treating “center” and “periphery” as self-evident labels. What qualifies as a center, for whom, and under what conditions? If centers are often defined by political authority and economic infrastructure, can they be constituted differently based on cultural prestige or reciprocal exchange? Can centers be temporary, mobile, or situational—emerging around a port season, a pilgrimage circuit, a publishing network, a diasporic institution, a platform, or an archive? Where center–periphery models have been widely used, this theme foregrounds different kinds of relationships: ones that coexist without a stable hierarchy, overlap without predictable outcomes, and connect without being reducible to rivalry or domination. “Multicentrality” also asks what kinds of forces organize historical and contemporary worlds. Power and coercion are not the only engines of centralization. Other binding energies, such as care, attention, wonder, hope, and curiosity, may also act as serious historical and analytical categories.