The Young Scholars Symposium on “Asia and the World in Critical Times” is organized by the Center for Global Asia and the Global Perspectives on Society program of NYU Shanghai, and the Asia Research Center of Fudan University. It brings together early career scholars at NYU Shanghai and other universities in China to share insights into issues pertaining to Asia in a global context. The sixth year of this symposium highlights scholars who explore the transregional connections, disconnections, and comparisons in Asia.

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. This theme will reveal insights into how crises of various orders and magnitudes—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.

The symposium hosts scholars from a range of disciplines as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary studies from universities in mainland China and Hong Kong.

*By invitation only