Shanghai, 17-19 April 2025

The Young Scholars Symposium on “Asia and the World” is an annual event organized by the Center for Global Asia and the Global Perspectives on Society program, NYU Shanghai, in collaboration with the Asia Research Center, Fudan University. 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 scholars working on Asia-related topics, especially those who explore transregional connections, disconnections, and comparisons.

The symposium will be hosted in person at NYU Shanghai on 17-19 April 2025 and open to scholars based in China. NYU Shanghai will provide accommodation and reimburse transportation expenses for participants traveling to Shanghai from within China.

This year’s theme, “Asia and the World in Critical Times,” aims to prompt reflections on both historical and contemporary pivotal moments marked by profound challenges and transformations that reshape societies on multiple levels – political, social, economic, cultural, and environmental. For Asia and the world at large, ‘critical times’ denote crises and vulnerabilities, but also new pathways for resilience, mobility, and futurity. Through this theme, we invite insights into how crises of various orders and magnitude, including those of geopolitics, environmental disasters, epistemic crisis, bodies in crises, or crises that may seem more ordinary, not only allow us to reimagine the relationship between Asia and the world but manifest unacknowledged temporalities, imaginaries, and aesthetic confabulations that also reflect Asian worlding (s) of the world.

We welcome scholars based in China from diverse disciplines as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary studies. Participants can focus on history, art, literature, society, archaeology, anthropology, and cultural studies, and examine and expand the ever-changing intellectual boundaries of academic scholarship on Asia and the broader world from different temporal perspectives.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Technology and media
• Gender and sexuality
• Environment and ecology
• Aesthetics and temporality

We invite proposals (250 words max.) for papers engaging with these themes and how they reinforce, mediate, or disrupt existing order. Abstracts with a short biographical note should be emailed to yss.nyush@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is 6th January 2025.